The Wii and Red Steel

I spent quite a few hours this weekend playing on our new Wii: Wii Sports, Super Monkey Ball, Red Steel, and the new Zelda.

The console itself is great; nice hardware, nice OS. There are a few niggles — for example, you can't add the same Wii to your address book more than once, so when you send a message to someone who shares a console with someone else, you can't distinguish the recipient — but I can put those down to teething troubles.

Zelda is great; Super Monkey Ball has some good mini games, some awful ones that expose the difficulties in the control method, etc.; but Red Steel deserves a summary.

The videos make Red Steel out to be some kind of sword sim. This is not the case. Imagine Max Payne, minus bullet time, plus the lightsaber duels from Jedi Knight. The sword is only used in set-piece duels, and the movement of the blade is only loosely related to the movement of the controller (you don't move it to block, for instance, but you can influence which strike you take). The Max Payne similarity is very strong; there's lots of moving round corners and firing shotguns at waiting guards, and it has comic book cutscenes. The thing I like about the game, actually, is how well it uses the Wii's controllers. You swing the nunchuk to throw grenades, open doors, and reload; you move your gun hand closer to the screen to zoom in; you aim and fire by pointing and pulling the trigger. It's all very intuitive — shooting people in the head with a large virtual revolver has never been so easy.

Posted at 2006-11-20 11:13:59 by Richard • Link to The Wii and Red St…
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