Yesterday, after Nintendo’s conference was wrapped up, we got to judge for ourselves, with both devices on display at Santa Monica Airport’s Barker Hangar.
First up was the Wii Zapper, Nintendo’s solution to making things a little more approachable when it comes to shooting games. The theory is straightforward enough: currently, first-person shooters aren’t the most intuitive games on Nintendo’s little white box; indeed, while rolling a bowling ball with the Wii Remote feels every bit as natural as the real thing, shooters arguably remain a jolting, slightly perplexing experience to Jack and Jane Newcomer, who form a key demographic in Nintendo’s bid to sell a Wii to, well, everybody on the planet.
Enter the Zapper. Its announcement during Reggie’s speech was met with an assortment of oohs and aahs from the crowd, and a generous round of applause followed when Fils-Aime announced that it would sell in North America for under US$20 (for the record, the Zapper has yet to be priced in other regions).
You reading, Sega? We want House of the Dead 2, pronto.
Later at Barker Hangar, a number of the things were hooked up to Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles, and drew in a reasonable number of people. Picking up the Zapper for the first time, it’s perhaps easy to see how Nintendo managed that sub-$20 price point. In a nutshell, the thing feels a touch cheap. That’s not to say it’s necessarily poorly designed, but it certainly lacks the build quality of, say, the Wii Balance Board (more on that later).
That said, the Wii Zapper is as ergonomic as it needs to be, and it’s not as though we’ll be performing yoga on top of it. Umbrella Chronicles was an ideal choice for showing it off, as well - though it’s some way from being the finest-looking title in Capcom’s esteemed horror series (Resident Evil 4 comfortably trumps it), the game’s shuffling, dawdling zombies gave first-time users a chance to acclimatise to the Zapper’s quirks.
The sensitivity, for example, takes a little getting used to. As your hands aren’t directly gripping the Wii Remote, and are instead placed further away than usual, simple physics dictates that a certain degree of control is lost. The initial jerkiness of the experience is gradually overcome however, and there’s no denying that using a gun-shaped peripheral adds to the authenticity of the experience somewhat, particularly when it comes to reloading, a maneuver performed by flicking the Zapper back, à la House of the Dead and numerous other lightgun titles.
Yet while the Zapper proved to be a mild distraction, it couldn’t compete with the Wii Balance Board and Wii Fit. If our brief experience is anything to go by, the Balance Board is a device with bundles of potential. We got to try out four different mini-games in Wii Fit, and all worked beautifully.
Leave your pride at the door for this one.
The first of these, and also our favourite, involved tilting an on-screen maze by exerting pressure on various parts of the Balance Board. By leaning in the right direction and to the correct degree, you could guide ball(s) to holes in the maze, which they needed to fall down if you wanted to progress to the next level. Essentially, it was a full-body version of Super Monkey Ball but with multiple balls to consider, and it proved every bit as absorbing as Sega’s simian-themed title. We reached a level with four balls, before our time ticked down to zero.
The "heading footballs" mini-game that was shown off by Miyamoto and Reggie earlier at the conference was also available, and relied on careful anticipation and quick reflexes. Meanwhile, a ski-jump game proved a little too tricky for this writer's sense of timing - I blame the jetlag - while the hula hoop exercise involved much swiveling of hips. Yes, you’ll probably look like a bit of a nugget while swiveling invisible hoops, but then the Wii has never truly been about looking dignified, has it?
The Balance Board itself is well-built, the perfect size (on that note, we were specifically asked for feedback on the size of the board - could Nintendo be revising the design before its release?), and felt like a supremely solid piece of kit. Little wonder that Nintendo didn’t reveal a price, for this is plainly going to be a good deal pricier than the Zapper. Yet that may not matter, for in the case of Wii Fit, something tells us Nintendo has another million-seller on its hands.
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