Staff Blog
Rockstar Table Tennis, Wii
Given their penchant for violence and controversy with games like the Grand Theft Auto and Manhunt series, Rockstar Games’ Table Tennis seems a little out of place for the developer’s San Diego office. Nevertheless, the wildly successful Xbox 360 title has made its debut on the Wii, where it makes perfect sense given the system’s nifty motion controls. However, like most game developers not named Nintendo that are making games for the Wii, the game comes close but still misses the mark, namely for not taking full advantage of the Wii remote.
Rockstar should get points for making a stripped-down, sweaty presentation of ping pong that has fun at its core, but no 1:1 ratio with the remote (which is what made Wii Sports so much fun) makes the game feel clunky. Instead of your character mimicking your movements, it just follows preprogrammed motions. That’s the problem with games that are originally designed for traditional controller-based systems like PS3 and Xbox that make their way to the Wii (see EA’s Tiger Woods 07 and 08 as examples). While in hand, the simple Wii Remote feels like paddle that should be swung accordingly, but Table Tennis leaves the player with an unintuitive control scheme that leads to mistimed and errant shots.
Gameplay is simple. You enter tournament after tournament, progressing through and unlocking new characters and uniforms as you go. Each character has different strengths and weaknesses (spin and service ability, defensive prowess, etc.), but it starts to feel the same after a while. While the single-player mode loses a little after playing for a bit, the games shines when it comes to playing against a human opponent. Like many two-player Wii games, you’ll risk life and limb as you and a pal swing furiously at the screen. For those schooled in Wii Sports tennis, the point of view can get a little confusing, seeing as how there’s no split-screen mode, but after a while I found myself preferring this view.
Don’t get me wrong here, Table Tennis is a fun game, and the sound, especially, is great – it actually sounds like real ping pong, and people will call encouragement for your character from the stands. Like a lot of other Wii owners, I just feel a little shortchanged.
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