I don't understand why this game exists. It's not based on a T.V. show, and it just seems like a very odd cast of celebrities. Half of them are sports stars like Mia Hamm and Sugar Ray Leonard, while the other half are musical acts like Avril Lavigne and Fergie. Did EA really need an excuse to capitalize on the sports mini-game collection fervor that had overtaken the Wii in 2008? Probably.
That's literally what this game is. It's a sports themed mini-game collection that inexplicably has celebrities in it. They add literally nothing to the game. If this was just a collection of sports themed mini-games it would have been decent. With the addition of celebrities it remains just that, decent. The collection of games is surprisingly varied and they all work as intended, even if they're not all the height of fun.
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| I guess this looks kind of like her. |
I picked Avril Lavigne, Noukeo picked Kristi Yamaguchi, then Landers and Bialy picked the generic characters Steve and Jimmy. At least I'm pretty sure they were Steve and Jimmy. You know everyone's favorite celebrities Steve and Jimmy... For some reason there were also a few random people thrown in and I guess it's possible to unlock more of them. Anyways, we then battled for supremacy.
Unlike most sports collection games it didn't have the staples like bowling and tennis. Instead it had a much more wide variety of things you wouldn't expect like badminton and curling. In case I've never mentioned it before I don't like curling at all. It was especially not fun in this game. It takes so god damn long and there's way too much time where you're literally doing nothing while the other team goes. It did control well though, which I guess is a plus.
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| Dodgeball is always fun in these types of games. |
Badminton was similar to how tennis is in most Wii games. You kind of just flail the Wii-remote like a jackass and hope that something good happens. It had the added bonus of being able to jump and spike the shuttle, but that mostly ended with a giant whiff. In order to get the best possible timing there was a green circle around the shuttle indicating that's the best time to hit it. The problem with that is that since the ground is also green it was not always super easy to see.
The one I had the most fun with was dodgeball. For some reason it's always done pretty well in these kinds of games. You get to a ball and then fling the wii-mote in order to throw the ball. You push A to catch and deflect oncoming balls, so it's not just an endless barrage. It's not the most complex game, but it's fun. You have to be good at timing your throws and know when you'll be able to catch the ball.
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| I was not a huge fan of the jousting... |
All the other games were just kind of average. Canoeing is always a total bummer, because paddling with the wii-mote is terrible. Archery worked, but there was nothing special to it. You just pull back the wii-mote while holding a and then let go. There was one unique mini-game though called Smash Joust. It was essentially a 1 vs. 1 game where each person has a foam paddle and they try to knock the other person off. You could attack high, low, or block. Obviously we just flailed the wii-mote, which caused us to clash. Whoever shook the wii-mote the hardest in the clash would win, but then you'd go right back into a clash. It was pretty awful.
The thing this game suffered from the most was convoluted controls. Every single game had 5 or 6 pages of controls to do all kinds of things. Then once you got into the game almost none of them mattered at all. Either pushing a button or flailing the wii-mote about wildly would almost always do exactly what you needed. There may have been some kind of highly nuanced play we were missing out on, but I highly doubt that,
I don't know. If you like sports mini-game collections this one is pretty fun.
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