Wii Sports Resort Cheats and More!

Posted by Wii Sports Resort Fan | March 8th, 2010

At last, a new game on the list!

Welcome back to Kotaku’s monthly look at the 10 most avidly-played Wii games, our so-called “measure of pleasure,” that charts which Wii games collect the least dust. Lego Star Wars has fallen to #11 thanks to the arrival of Harvest Moon: Animal Parade. People sure do like playing their Harvest Moon games a lot.

(Click the chart to enlarge)

For many months, the same games have appeared in this top 10, based on data pulled from Nintendo’s official tracking service of Wii users (full explanation of where the numbers come from below). The lack of a new entry has been disappointing, but understandable. These top 10 games each average more than 40 hours per person who plays them. Any new games have a long way to go before they reach that threshold, and some just don’t have enough content to come close.

New Super Mario Brothers, for example, is only at 22 hours per player as of March 1. The surprisingly hot-selling Just Dance has been played, on average, just over five.

The news this month, though, is that a new Harvest Moon, subtitled Animal Parade, has given its players enough of a fever. It cracks the top 10, with a 43-hour, 59-minute average playing time.

Animal Parade knocks Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga off the list. That game ascended to an average playing time of 43 hours and 52 minutes, but was passed by the Animal Parade rocket. Expect Lego Star Wars, which continues to post steady play-time increases, to return in a few months, passing the stagnating or declining likes of Rock Band 2 or The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess. Those games are hovering at close to 46 and 47 hours per player, respectively.

In The Margins
-One game that continues to bear watching is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare: Reflex Edition. The online multiplayer of Call of Duty: World at War has helped that 2008 Wii game to post high numbers on this chart. The 2009 Reflex edition isn’t Top 10 material yet, but in the past four months it has shot up from about 17 hours per player to 32.5, gaining 5.5 of its hours in just the past month. It has a shot of making this list someday.

-Slow and steady but never successful enough to make the Top 10, Mario Kart Wii is about to reach the 37-hour mark. It hit the 36-hour mark over the New Year, making it one of the most-played games on the Wii. That is a great feat for any top-selling game, given how prone the top-sellers are to having some consumers drag the average playing time down.

-No one asked, but Jeep Thrills rose from an average playing time, as of February 1, of 3 hours, 32 minutes, to, a month later, 3 hours, 35 minutes. Who even knew there was a game called Jeep Thrills?

Where’s all this from? (AKA an explanation of the above chart for stat junkies only): In a move somewhat surprising for the generally secretive company, Nintendo makes all of this data public. Any Wii owner can download the Nintendo Channel to their Wii and begin browsing for games. Any game that has been played enough times has usage stats listed for it, contributed by anyone who chose to share their data with the channel. The sample size that the channel tracks is pretty good, though it is obviously biased toward users who hook up a Wii to the Internet. We calculate that sample size by looking at Wii Sports usage numbers, which show that more than 98 million sessions of that game have been played by Nintendo Channel users as of March 1 (up 4 million in the last month), for an average of 29.66 sessions per player. That divides to more than 3.3 million Wii Sports users whose gaming has been tracked by the channel. Since almost all Wii Sports owners in North America would be Wii users, we will venture that as many as 3.3 million people have contributed stats. That is up from the 3.2 million people when these numbers were run for February 1. (October 09 data is not included on the chart due to a problem with Nintendo’s data reporting in the previous month.)

Tags: Original, Top, Wii, Wii stats report

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Posted by Wii Sports Resort Fan | September 30th, 2009

The calendar says “2009″. The Xbox 360 launched in 2005. That means we’re four years into the “next generation” of video gaming. If so, then where the hell are our “next generation” games?

It’s something that’s been gnawing at me for a while now, but as we approach Christmas 2009 – the fifth holiday season for the Xbox 360, and fourth for the PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii – that gnawing has turned into some serious, unchecked mastication.

After all, a new hardware generation is meant to usher in a new generation of games to go with it. And not just games that look prettier, or sound better; titles that give you something entirely new in terms of game design and mechanics, something that could only be done by taking advantage of the latest in console hardware.

Yet I think only a handful of games this console generation have done so. Which ones? Oh, I’m glad you asked. Games like:

Dead Rising – There has never been a game like Dead Rising. It’s open-world in appearance, but the entire game is built around the concept of navigating an endless sea of zombies in numbers previous consoles simply couldn’t get on-screen at once.

Oblivion/Fallout 3 – Two games, I know, but they do the same thing, so they go in the same listing. Nobody ever forgets that first time you leave the Imperial sewers/Vault 101 and take in the world around you, realising that Bethesda haven’t crafted a level, they’ve built a seamless, living world well beyond the scale of previous titles like Morrowind.

Yes, they also appear on PC, but remember, these games were also built from the ground up with consoles in mind, rather than being crude ports.

Wii Sports/Wii Sports Resort – To this day, the only games that have truly delivered on the promise of the Wii Remote, integrating it so naturally within the gameplay experience that you can’t imagine playing the games without it.

So as good as Modern Warfare is, as good as Mario Galaxy is, I don’t call them truly “next gen” games. Why? Because they fail my “next gen” test, that’s why.

Here’s the test: If a game can be ported to a console in a previous generation and keep its core gameplay and overall design in place, it’s not what I’m calling for the purposes of this piece a “next gen” game. Mario Galaxy was great, but really, it’s a GameCube title with some star-shaking stuff thrown in. Modern Warfare? Amazing, but as the upcoming Wii port attests, it used the 360 and PS3 primarily for better graphics and sound. LittleBigPlanet? Another great game, but the PSP version shows the core experience could have been done on a PS2.

Other games I think fail this test are Halo 3, BioShock, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Uncharted, Metal Gear Solid 4…OK, pretty much everything. You get the idea. Sure, they’re nice and shiny, and have lovely pre-rendered cutscenes, and there are advanced uses of physics and AI under the hood, and most important of all, advanced online connectivity, but all of those are just tweaks, improvements, icing on the cake, candy for the eyes. None of them fundamentally change the way you approach a game, or a genre.

Not like Mario Kart and F-Zero did with Parallax scrolling. Or Mario 64 with its use of 3D. Or Grand Theft Auto III with its living, breathing city. Those games re-wrote the book. You just couldn’t do GTAIII on the PlayStation. Or Mario 64 on the SNES. They were true “next gen” games.

Now, I’m not saying all games NEED to be 100% innovative. That’s an impossible requirement. Ridiculous, even. Not every single game idea is going to bust outside the box. I like my latest version of FIFA or Call of Duty as much as the next man, and the world will spin just fine with the majority of games simply plodding along, doing what the last one did, only slightly better. Still, a man can want, can’t he?

So why do we have so few this time around? What’s the problem? There’s refinement under the hood. There’s games that some, and especially the developers, may disagree with me on (GTAIV, for example, or Halo 3 and its extensive multiplayer modes). And there are some who could argue, with a fair point, that the same problem plagued the previous generation.

Certainly the cost of development can’t help. Worlds are built with engines, and engines are built on rules. If you wanted to come up with something entirely new, you’d have to do it yourself, which for many developers and publishers in this current economic climate just isn’t feasible.

It can also be argued that a single jump in the mid-90′s – from the 16-bit era to the N64 and PS1 – will long be the most significant in gaming, taking us as it did from 2D to 3D, and that subsequent generations can’t be relied upon to deliver the same level of innovation. Fair, to a point, but then there are still plenty of games like GTAIII that were able to innovate well past the 32-bit era.

One final possibility, however, is that there is innovation going on in today’s games beyond the superficial. It’s just, we can’t see it. Chatting with Bethesda’s Todd Howard on the subject, he put this idea forward:

“I think the visual component of it is the one that everyone notices first, and it’s also the prime part that benefits from what the new hardware gives you” he says. “So it’s just harder to see the innovations beyond that, but they’re there. I’d guess there’s just as much pure ‘design innovation’ with this generation as there has been in the last few.”

“Look at the basis now for how games handle physics, difficulty, controls, save games, or simple load screens. I know it sounds silly, but I get excited by innovations in loading screens, because they’re the worst part of a game. I’m interested in how games simply start.”

Promising, yeah, but does that really hold water when compared to more fundamental changes? Not really. “There’s been innovations in AI, but it certainly hasn’t kept pace with the graphic fidelity, which yields this overall feeling of it going backwards” Howard adds. “The environments are so complex now in games, that building good AI just to manoeuvre them takes serious time. But that’s not an innovation, that’s simply the AI doing what it could do before in a game.

“My hope is, as we developers turn the corner on how to make the games simply ‘work,’ that we can innovate more on how the games respond to the player, whether that is the AI, or socially, or something else.”

Maybe that explains it, and in 30 years, we’ll look back on the current generation as one where developers were finding their feet, laying the groundwork for sprawling, innovating and revolutionary titles of the future.

Tags: Bethesda, Dead Rising, Fallout 3, Feature, Innovation, Oblivion, Original, PS3, Top, Xbox 360

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Posted by Wii Sports Resort Fan | September 26th, 2009

Twenty years ago I learned how to rename the rosters for Accolade’s Hardball! and rig the players’ performances. Every player would be a 40-40 man, I boasted to Dad. “Not really interested,” he said, “It’s not real baseball.”

I thought about that old Commodore 64 game a few weeks ago when a friend told me he’d taken back his Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 – and the Wii MotionPlus he’d bought to play it. Having mastered golf on Wii sports, he saw the new motion controller and decided, on impulse, it would give him an even more enjoyable golf outing. He found it came too close to the frustrating experience of real golf, with which he was already familiar. So for him, going back to “not real golf” was satisfying enough.

No other console genre – except for maybe the racers, which I would argue are a subset of sports – has such a love-hate relationship with reality. Running about a battlefield and firing off headshots, no one sincerely expects to do that in real life under similar conditions. But sports are grounded in skills that, even if one never learned them, are taught to children and shown on television broadcasts that, every day, make them look easy – even if deep down we know just how rare it is to see them performed live and in person.

There’s a greater expectation that they’re more repeatable than trained combat skills. But there are far more soldiers in the world than elite athletes. And if a game were to truly represent a professional sport’s difficulty – and PGA Tour 10 came too close for my friend – then down goes the controller.

All of this gets back, in some way, to the definition of a “sports game,” and, underneath that, the definition of a “sport.”

Taken at its broadest definition – at least the one that I use – a sport is a competition played to a measurable result and contested under objectively enforced rules. If that’s the case, then any multiplayer shooter qualifies as a sport. Absent exploits, one would expect any computer game to always impartially enforce rules and award goals, or at least have its shortcomings applicable to both sides. Few consider competitive video gaming a sport, however.

But there are some who consider figure skating is a sport (it is not, it’s a judged competition, like a dance contest), and that bowling isn’t (it is; knock down the most pins according to the rules, you win.) For them, some athletic demonstration is an essential feature of a sport. It’s why some have a hard time accepting NASCAR – sit in a car and turn left for 500 miles – as a sport.

Yet turning that back to video games – the ones that take advantage of motion controls and, therefore, exertion, are almost universally regarded as less serious a sports game than their traditionally controlled counterparts. The biggest selling game with the word “sports” in its title is not considered by many to be a sports game. And that’s the aforementioned Wii Sports, and its 2009 cousin, Wii Sports Resort. Nor, for that matter, does it include Wii Fit, whose caloric demand in a single game instance is greater than your thumbs simulating every play and personnel move in a full season Madden NFL 10.

Is there a way to include both in a definition of a sports game? I think so.

• A sports game allows you to imitate and reasonably achieve the results you see in a real athletic competition. Wii Sports has a home run derby. So does Major League Baseball 2K9. Wii Boxing’s point is the same as Fight Night. Tactically speaking, those who half-ass their approach to Wii Golf will improve their score no more than someone who doesn’t consider his shots in real life.

• A sports game keeps records and allows for progression. All league simulations feature this. Wii Sports likewise records one’s personal bests. And it’s a basic necessity of something like Wii Fit, which is supposed to chart your exercise progress.

• A sports game’s rules and framework is not wholly invented for purposes of a video game. A baseball game draws on rules codified more than a century ago. Madden’s gameplay structure is based on the NFL rulebook. Similarly, Wii Sports’ tennis and golf need no tutorial – they’re understood by anyone who have played either game in real life.

Note that I didn’t say that a league’s licensing is essential to a sports game. It wasn’t in Hardball!, 20 years ago. All Pro Football and Blitz: The League have no league license either, but no one’s calling them action/adventure games.

While I understand my father’s distinction between “real baseball” and what plays out on a computer screen, I do think there’s a finer point to sports gaming than what I thought it to be as a teenager. That after 100 cheaply won, 10-run, 20-hit victories, simply keeping a binder full of boxscores does not a simulated sport make. That’s focusing on result, and not process. In other words, it’s not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game.

Stick Jockey is Kotaku’s column on sports video games. It appears Saturdays at 10 a.m. U.S. Mountain time.

Tags: Original, Sports, Stick jockey, Top

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