Welcome to Wii-cember. Throughout the month of December, Nick will be checking out Wii games in his collection that he has never played before and sharing his thoughts. “Why play Wii games in 2023?” you may ask, to which I say, Why not? It should be a fun time and who knows, maybe you will discover an awesome-looking game that will make you run out and buy a Wii like it’s 2006. Scroll down to watch each episode and read the episode scripts. Happy Wii-cember, everyone!
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Reflex | War on Christmas
I’m pretty familiar with Call of Duty 4 as it is one of my favorite Call of Duty games and one of the best games in the entire series. But I really wanted to lean into this being a fun and unique experience, so I was excited upon looking at the back of the box to discover the Wii version supports the Wii Zapper accessory!
So I loaded up my plastic firearm and booted up the game. The first difference I noticed was the amount of control options in the menu. They really do give you a pretty fine degree of control over your play experience which I thought was neat. Then I started a new game and…. Oh….oh my…. Ooohhhhh I fell off the ladder. Oh god, this should be interesting.
Even before I talk about the motion controls, the visuals look like they have been buffed with some coarse grit sandpaper. I should take the time to mention for ease of recording I am playing these Wii games via the backward compatibility of the Wii U, so it probably doesn’t help that these games are being displayed on my 55-inch flat screen. But even still everything from the environment to the characters looks severely compromised in order to run on the Wii. Going from the remastered version that was released a few years back to this is quite the shock.
It’s funny looking at how compromised the visuals of this version are because the game as you might gather from the gameplay still doesn’t run great. If you are walking in a straight line with nothing happening around you it’s ok, but the second you get into a medium-sized conflict the game immediately starts chugging like The Little Engine That Could. I will say it rarely gets so bad to the point of being unplayable but adapting to an entirely new system of aiming while the framerate drops was an entirely different challenge to try and overcome.
Let’s talk about aiming. Playing with the Wii Zapper was honestly hilarious. I was laughing the entire time I was playing the FNG ship training course, spectacularly failing into every room just to get hit with a recommended Recruit difficulty. I tried a couple more runs to get a recommendation of Regular so I didn’t completely embarrass myself for this video. Trying to aim with the Zapper felt like trying to control a wild firehouse, you end up shooting all over the place trying to get your reticle onto the enemies.
This is made even worse when you have to reload. The way the controls are mapped, you have to shake the Wii nunchuck in order to reload. When the Wii remote and Nunchuck are used on their own, it actually doesn’t feel bad, it kinda mimics the motion of flicking a magazine out of a gun. But when the controllers are connected to the Zapper, they are fixed to the one plastic mold, so every time you go to reload your weapon your aim flies all over the place from you shaking the back of the “gun”. To be fair, it’s also pretty funny for a bit. Eventually, I employed a “turret” approach where I rested the zapper on top of a stool to try and steady my aim which did actually help for a bit. And despite the aiming being a challenge, the sound effects and the feedback of the shooting are as quality as they have always been.
It was at the point in the game where I had to defend Captain Mcmillan after “All Ghillied Up” where I just wasn’t able to be accurate enough to be able to survive the several-minute assault. At this point, I had to abandon the zapper and just used the Wii remote and nunchuck on their own, and wouldn’t you believe it, the game controls much easier this way.
While these might seem like a lot of negative issues, and they are, honestly I still had a lot of fun playing Modern Warfare Reflex. It’s a pretty faithful port of CoD 4 for the Wii. All the missions and modes have been carried over, and while technically speaking there is a lot to be desired, the core design of the game is still a blast. The game is a breezy action set-piece extravaganza of a first-person shooter that doesn’t ever step off the gas until the credits roll. It has all the great parts of Call of Duty 4 like sneaking through the fields in a ghillie suit and assaulting the freighter as well as all the annoying parts like the enemies with laser accuracy in the missile silo. And despite all the jank, this was still a new way to experience Call of Duty 4, which for someone who has played through the game 7 or 8 times brought a smile to my face.
If I had to sum up my experience playing Call of Duty Modern Warfare Reflex Edition, I’d say it was like playing a fever dream. Things certainly resembled something I was familiar with, but they looked distorted and felt off.
And for those saying Call of Duty 4 isn’t a holiday game, there is a level with snow in it towards the end of the game. So there.
Guitar Hero: Van Halen | Rockin Around
The second game I played for Wii-cember is Guitar Hero Van Halen. About a year ago I got bit by the Guitar Hero bug pretty hard and bought and played a bunch of the games I never got around to, but Van Halen slipped through the cracks. Guitar Hero games can be hit and miss and I wasn’t super familiar with the music of Van Halen but I went into this with an open mind. I swapped my plastic firearm for a plastic guitar and started it up.
That Guitar Hero bug had bit me right after I had played Elden Ring so from that point on I have named each of my bands in these games Tarnished.
All of the single band-focused Guitar Hero games start pretty similar to one another. You get to play a song or two from the title band to get a taste of what to expect and then you get to choose and customize your own character. I always go with my main man Clive. I love the style clash of this Beatles-inspired hippie character when I end up playing rock or metal songs. All of the Guitar Hero games feature a bunch of customization options for different clothing and guitars. You know, the stuff that all be microtransactions if the game was released today.
For anyone that hasn’t played a Guitar Hero game before, you have a row of colored buttons on your controller and a strum bar. In the game, there is a “highway” where colored notes move towards you in a set order. You have to hit the correct colored button and strum the strum bar at the proper time to successfully play a note. Sustained notes require you to hold the colored button for the duration that they are on screen. There are some other mechanics as well like hammer-on notes which you only need to press the corresponding color button to successfully hit, but these are the fundamentals you need to play. The more notes you hit correctly, the more of the song you get to hear uninterrupted and the better your score is at the end.
The Guitar Hero gameplay loop has aged like a fine wine. You can pick up just about any game in the series and have a fun time with it. Guitar Hero is like a swiss army knife, it’s fun to play by yourself or in a group, there’s a number of difficulty options that suit a bunch of different skill ranges, and it truly is a game that rewards skillful play and practice. I play most Guitar Hero games on medium. I am able to play some songs on hard and get by, but I usually hit a wall in the career where I just can’t get past a particularly technical song. And if I’m being honest, I enjoy actually listening to the songs I am playing and not having them sound like a washing machine falling down a flight of stairs every time I miss a string of notes.
What’s also nice about Guitar Hero compared to something like Call of Duty, is that the visuals don’t exactly matter for the people playing the game. The thing you should be paying attention to are the notes flying towards you on the highway, which is mainly just a flat rectangle and some colored circles. So I hardly ever notice any shortcomings of the Wii hardware when I play a Guitar Hero game. The art direction is more creative, going for a more cartoonish look rather than trying to be photorealistic which helps cover up any rough edges that may have reared their head in something like Modern Warfare Reflex.
And thankfully the technical performance is pretty great even on the Wii. When I played Guitar Hero Warriors of Rock last year, I had a good amount of stuttering that happened during gameplay which made the faster songs in that game more annoying when it would cause me to miss notes. I didn’t really encounter that while playing Van Halen, overall the game ran pretty smooth, only noticeably pausing when flipping through options in the character creator.
Guitar Hero Van Halen is the 11th main installment of the Guitar Hero series. By this point, they had the gameplay loop pretty well ironed out. So these later games really live or die by their music selection. While it might not be apparent based on the title, Guitar Hero Van Halen doesn’t just feature Van Halen songs. You alternate from playing a set of Van Halen tracks to a set of tracks from other bands and artists. Overall the song choice in Van Halen is alright. I wouldn’t say there were any songs that I disliked listening to, but the overall package doesn’t hit the highs that can be felt in Guitar Hero 3 or Metallica which are some of my personal favorites. Van Halen falls in the middle range, not the worst song list but also not the best. To give the game credit, it did expand my familiarity with Van Halen music, and they do have some real bangers under their belt.
One aspect of these band-focused titles I enjoy are the bonus features. Many songs in the game have a bonus feature option where you can find written song lyrics as well as a looped video with facts about the band or a specific song. These are a fun way to learn a bit about the respective bands that are displayed in a more engaging or fun way compared to just reading the information off of a Wikipedia page or something.
The one part of Guitar Hero Van Halen that stood out to me as being lackluster was its ending. A bunch of Guitar Hero games often end with a big and slightly challenging song, sometimes you play them as the credits are rolling. In this game, there are a couple technical songs, followed by three very short “songs” that are more just solo guitar playing, and then there isn’t anything playing during the credits. There are also no unlockable songs which was a bit disappointing as that’s another feature of other Guitar Hero games. Once you have money from all your gigs, going and buying new songs was such a fun reward, but no such reward here, what you see is what you get.
Guitar Hero Van Halen was a fun time. It’s not among my favorites in the series but outside of a lackluster ending I really didn’t have any issues with it. And with that, I have finished each of the classic Guitar Hero games. Guess I still have to play Guitar Hero Live at some point, but that’s for another day.
Mad World | Red-Nosed Chainsaw
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