Sports Champions
Anyone for bocce?
Bocce is another highlight. No, we hadn't either, but basically it's petanque. If you've never heard of petanque, basically it's boules. If you've never heard of boules, basically it's trying to chuck big balls as close as possible to a smaller ball on some gravel.
Once again Move's capabilities shine. It's possible to roll balls along the ground as well as lob them up into the air so they land with a thud. There are no issues with floatiness or odd trajectories, which you might expect if you've played any Wii bowling game except Nintendo's. Bocce is also great for multiplayer sessions, especially if you're good at tonking other players' balls right out of the game.
Beach Volleyball is less successful. You hold the Move while performing serves, spikes, digs and so on, using arm movements just like you would in real life. Except in real life you'd also be running round the court - here your character moves round automatically. Your only task is to move your arms in the right way at the right time, which quickly gets tedious. At least in Just Dance you also have to move your legs. And in time to Technotronic.
Disc Golf sits somewhere on the middle of the spectrum between the excellence of Archery and the mediocrity of Beach Volleyball. The Move becomes a frisbee, and you compete across expansive courses to see who can hit the target with the least number of throws. The physics work fine and the environments are pretty enough, but it all gets rather samey after a while.
Finally there's Gladiator Duel, the mini-game which is most like a videogame and least like a real sport. You use the Move as a sword, swiping at your enemy in a bid to either knock them out of the arena or knock all the yellow out of their health bar.
You also have a shield you can use by pressing the trigger button, or by aiming the second controller if you have one. As you can't hit with the first controller at the same time your shield is raised, this doesn't give you an advantage.
However, it's worth calibrating both so you can press the Move buttons on each respective controller to dodge left and right. Otherwise, using just the one Move, you're forced to press the stupidly tiny square and triangle buttons. This is a massive pain in the heat of battle, not to mention the arse.
Gladiator Duel is the only mini-game in which the Move sometimes struggles to recognise all your movements and recreate them quickly. Trying to perform jump attacks (by raising the controller above your head) and shield bashes (by thrusting it forwards) can be particularly frustrating. It often takes a second too long for the game to replicate these movements, and sometimes they aren't recognised at all.
That said, when it comes to making you feel like you're swinging a real weapon, Gladiator Duel does better than the motion-controlled sword-slashing games which have come before it. The issues with dodging and movement recognition aren't big enough to render the game unplayable. It just feels like a work in progress.
It also looks like the work has been in progress since 2002, and as if no one has bothered to do anything with the visuals in the intervening years. This is partly due to stiff animations and bland, generic environments. However, it's mainly down to the desperately naff avatars you are forced to play as and compete against.