What you essentially get with Big BS is the barebones of a casual sports package -- six 'beach-themed' and rule-based activities, ranging from 'Volleyball', 'Disc Golf', 'Cricket', 'Soccer', 'Football' (American flavoured) and everybody's Roman favourite, 'Bocce Ball'. With all the hallmarks of a 'Wii Sports wannabe', Big BS's few strengths unsurprisingly lie in its four-player compatible multiplayer modes. Single-player 'Tournament' support, while available, is unfortunately next to irrelevant -- any sense of achievement is exclusive to playing against the game's questionable computer AI, ramping up in difficulty (to amusingly unfair lengths) with each successive win and addition to your character profile's cumulative trophy wins and 'Skill Points'. Indeed, glorified player validations where a simple menu option for difficulty would have sufficed.
Wicket Keeper: Yoohoo! I'm bee-hind you!
Batsman: I'm out.
Batsman: I'm out.
When you do manage a couple of human folks together for a game, the hurdles in new players getting to grips with Big BS's controls are mixed, in more ways than one. Entirely Wii Remote driven, they're simple and forgiving enough, in the sense that the average person will be able to throw together combinations of random gestures and button presses and receive some sort of onscreen gratification. Those looking for a bit more precision and a sense of elegance to Big BS's control schemes however will find that, as expected out of a waggle-centric game -- much less one doing away completely with the use of the Wii Nunchuk -- Big BS's controls are, in most cases literally hit or miss. Naturally, this means all manner of poor results for the actual playability and lastability of Big BS's kinetic beach party.
The unbalanced design in interface and gameplay is perhaps most telling in Big BS's inherent imitation of Wii Sports' line-up. While 'Volleyball', 'Bocce Ball' and 'Disc Golf' are more or less respective gesture variants on Nintendo's seminal 'Tennis', 'Bowling', and 'Golf', the somewhat fresh faced likes of 'Football', 'Soccer', and 'Cricket' are largely untested concepts, and likewise, suffer from unrefined and unresponsive play. 'Football' and 'Soccer' in particular are the most confusing and downright frustrating culprits, becoming unnecessarily complicated affairs with their on-the-fly controls shared between gestures and button pressing. Moreover sadly, even with 'Cricket' being both the first iteration of the sport on Wii -- and therefore arguably the largest draw for an Aussie player to Big BS -- it nevertheless also suffers from poor waggle implementation, bringing with it all sorts of delayed ducks. Disappointing for certain online movements, to be sure.
The bowler's got the right idea -- playing this game
with your eyes closed may very well be more effective.
with your eyes closed may very well be more effective.
The same disappointment can also be aimed at Big BS's all-round aesthetics. Verily, expecting 'next-gen' visuals out of a casual game is naïve -- expecting the same out of a Wii casual sports title even more so. While environments are serviceably colourful and detailed, it's the player models that'll catch the disconcerting eye, looking altogether as far away from cute and charming as possible. Resembling features closer to deranged, yet physically active leftovers from the Troll era of humanity, mixed with Children of the Corn motifs, players will be hard pressed to feel anything but animosity toward their avatars. The audio department does its worst to beat Big BS's visual unpleasantness, with notably perhaps one of the most repetitive and downright annoying musical numbers playing unabashedly as players navigate menu screens. Sure, this is a sub-sixty-Australian-dollar game, but is it too much to ask for a consideration of player sanity in that price range?
The sole example of ingenuity on display in Big BS is its connectivity with the seldom Wii-considered Nintendo DS. Offering a 'Create a Face' option in the game's otherwise lacklustre 'Create a Player' menu, it opens up all manner of clever, if basic, custom face doodling and squiggling through the DS's touch screen. And if the default set of custom character entities weren't ugly enough, surely one's own artistic merits will be able to remedy/emphasise that to an alluring/mortifying degree.
A monkey, a ball, and a crab. No, we don't see the innuendo either.
Considering the average Wii owner already has a copy of Wii Sports by default, it's hard at this point in the console's lifecycle to recommend the unquestionably imitational likes of Big Beach Sports. The game makes no large movements in offering more than Nintendo's casual hit, with either cleverly veiled variations on the Wii Sports formula or overly complicated and downright unenjoyable sports. And now with Wii Sports Resort on the not-too-distant MotionPlus bundled horizon, it becomes ever more difficult to find patience with Big BS's ironically non-exotic offerings. Unless you're looking for a night's rental of unintentional laughs with a few beers and mates, keep yourself and your impressionable offspring and wallet away from Big BS's shores.
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