Deca Sports (Wii) Preview
Posted by Ramon Aranda on 02.05.2008
Vitals
Genre
Sports Compilation
System
Nintendo Wii
Release Date
Q0 0000
Wii Sports gets another challenger for king of sports mini-games.
I recently attended a press event hosted by Hudson Entertainment and had some hands-on time with a few of their titles. One of those games was the recently announced Deca Sports for the Nintendo Wii. The game aims to be in the same category as Nintendo's Wii Sports but with a larger collection of games to play. The current set of sports available are, Beach Volleyball, Snowboard Cross, Badminton, Basketball, Curling, Figure Skating, Archery, Supercross, Soccer and Kart Racing.
I decided to take a crack at Badminton first which looked kind of fun when watching two other journalists getting down. As expected, only the Wii Remote is necessary to play and for this particular game, no buttons were needed to be pressed either. Similar to Tennis in Wii Sports, you had to swing the remote when the birdie was nearing your player. If you managed to swing earlier when the birdie reached it's peak, you could manufacture a mega-swing which flung the birdie at a high speed, making it difficult to return. You could also swing softer and produce a lob. There wasn't much more to it than that but it proved to be quite fun.
Other games I came across were Archery which seemed cool at first though as you can imagine, got kind of boring after a while. Basketball was also on display and you simply swing the Wii remote in one of various directions to pass, shoot or block. It took me a few minutes to get a hang of it but then seemed pretty natural. I also had a chance to play Soccer which reminded me of a stripped down version of Mario Strikers Charged. You pass the ball in much the same way and you have only a handful of players on the field. Scoring was not as easy as you'd think so it may be the more competitive games in the set.
Style-wise, the game looks something like a cross breed between EA Playground and Wii Sports. You'll be able to choose from not just one character but a whole team that you'll be representing during all the events. Each team has a unique look and a team emblem to go with it. I was a bit disappointed however that Miis would not be included in the game nor any customization option for the characters themselves. The game can do up to four players but will not include any Wi-Fi functionality.
Overall it looked like a pretty decent package, and at the right price could do fairly well. The controls seem pretty fine tuned for the most part and though the game was far from finished, it looked polished enough. The game is set to release this summer and with the added few months, I hope the developers will rethink the use of Miis or some kind of online functionality.
I decided to take a crack at Badminton first which looked kind of fun when watching two other journalists getting down. As expected, only the Wii Remote is necessary to play and for this particular game, no buttons were needed to be pressed either. Similar to Tennis in Wii Sports, you had to swing the remote when the birdie was nearing your player. If you managed to swing earlier when the birdie reached it's peak, you could manufacture a mega-swing which flung the birdie at a high speed, making it difficult to return. You could also swing softer and produce a lob. There wasn't much more to it than that but it proved to be quite fun.
