Deca Sports

The popularity of Wii Sports has spawned, for better or worse, a glut of sports mini-games in the past two years – most have sold very well. Deca Sports is the latest Wii Sports clone to hit the market and attempt to capitalize on the Wii’s unprecedented success. While it doesn’t come near to the quality of a Nintendo first-party title, a few of its sports games will be fun for families playing together.

To begin with, Deca has mimicked nearly everything about Wii Sports, from the techno-music, to its own version of cutesy Mii’s who populate the selection of players and the audience. Being a copycat is Ok, as long as you’re gosh-darn good at it. The cartoon characters look more like Lego characters with very rough textures and polygons. I’m sure developer Hudson Soft was unable to use Mii’s because of Nintendo policy, but this game could at least use some customization like the Mii system. Instead, before playing a sport, you choose a team of composed for their various strengths, like speed, strength, etc…

Deca offers 10 sports: archery, badminton, basketball, beach volleyball, curling, figure skating, soccer, kart racing, snowboarding, and supercross. Badminton and beach volleyball have nearly identical controls. The controls in badminton are actually pretty impressive and work well. Contrasting from Wii Tennis, the game is played from an isometric point of view. Players flip the Wii-Mote to serve, and then to return shots, swing down at the angle you want to it. I was most impressed by how it registered the angles and speed of the swing. If you swung quickly left, it would go far left; swing easy right, and it goes short right. Wii Tennis used timing to position the shots, but it looks like Deca has done something better. Hitting a smash is about timing when the feather ball glows red. The controls for beach volleyball are identical to badminton, except for a few serving differences.

In the bike racer, players control the bike by holding the Wii-Mote horizontally and tilting it. The controls are very tight and quick – almost too much so. The blandness of the track design, lack of challenging A.I., and unpolished mechanics bring this one down, however. And the kart racing is almost identical; in fact, Hudson Soft would have been better off just ripping off Mario Kart too and combining the karts and bikes together to make the gameplay a little bit deeper. Instead, players get a very shallow racer with one bland looking track for each sport and very dumb A.I. If

Figure skating was not what I expected – in a good way. Winter Sports features a rhythm style figure skating game which, while it did work, didn’t always feel immersive. Deca Sports lets players actually control the skater with the Nunchuck analog and follow a trail of glowing circles around the arena. When you come upon a big circle you flip the Wii-Mote up, doing a trick. It is actually successful.

Basketball and soccer both share similar controls and attempt to make Deca Sports even deeper, but are plagued with problems. Basketball is the better of the two, which requires players to use a simple throw motion with the Wii-Mote to shoot the ball, using the nunchuck to run. However, for soccer, the shooting mechanic is not as good, requiring a waggle motion to kick a goal. In fact it was so unresponsive and the goalie was so good that in my soccer game, neither team actually scored. Both games ultimately suffer from the inability to differentiate teammates! In both games, if you want to pass the ball down the court or field to a certain team member, you can’t. You can only hit a button to switch the selected member randomly and it is not under the players control to select a specific teammate. Talk about dropping the ball. . .

Snowboarding is even worse. The graphics look absolutely horrendous, on par with a Nintendo 64 game and the animations of your boarder are limited to about three different positions. While twisting the Wii-Mote turns and pulling up or back controls speed, the level is so blandly designed that the controls are almost meaningless. Of course, like all the other sports, you only get one level.

Archery and curling work well, especially if you’re playing with friends. Archery is controlled using only the Wii-Mote. You press B and pull back on the Wii-Mote, aim, and then fire towards the target – the game works because you don’t have the unnatural precision given in a game like Mario and Sonic at the Olympics, but only a guess at where your arrow will land. Curling is kept simple and very effective. Unlike Winter Sports’ complicated version of curling, this one is actually fun.

The graphics in Deca Sports suffer from inconsistency and a lack of polish. The different sports have such a wildly different presentation, from okay to horrible, that you feel like you’re actually playing a game of Graphical Roulette instead of badminton or snowboarding. There isn’t the slightest attempt at being original in this game, but Deca Sports will more than likely sell millions of copies.

Gameplay: 5.0
Some of the mechanics, like badminton, are fun, but others are broken entirely.

Graphics: 5.0
Again, some sports look Ok and have reasonably detailed environments, others not so good.

Sound: 6.0
The techno is lively and commands families to start an impromptu dance party in the living room.

Difficulty: Easy

Concept: 3.0
A complete rip-off of Wii Sports, even down to the menu presentation.

Multiplayer: 8.0
This game is really only tolerable if you have a family to share it with.

Overall: 5.0
Families seeking their next Wii-Sports fix will have some fun with this $30 budget title, but it hardly has the same polish of Nintendo’s groundbreaking title.