Figure Skating

I seriously can not get enough of figure skating. The game is creative, challenging, addictive and a really impressive use of the Wii remote and Nunchuck. Basically you’re tasked with skating through a routine to some classical music. You control your skater with the joystick on the nunchuck and perform tricks by flicking your Wii remote. To complete the routine, you follow yellow dots around the ice rink and you need to hit the dots in correspondence with their musical cues. If you swerve off the line you’ll get out of whack with the music and if you get to far out of line then you can’t complete your routine.

As you follow the yellow dots, bigger red, green or blue dots appear. These are the trick dots. When you skate into them you flick your Wii remote and perform a different trick depending on the color. Some tricks have you stay stationary while others you must continue skating with, restricting your ease of control. Timing is important as you both have to hit the trick in time with the music and, in order to get the highest score, flick the Wii remote at the exact center of the shrinking dot. If the dot disappears then you lost your trick.

Call me whatever you want but this was actually a lot of fun to do. It’s like a fun rhythm game hiding behind a boring sport. Since only one person skates at a time (I doubt there will be doubles in the final game) there isn’t much multiplayer fun here other than to compete with your friends, but seeing as suggesting a rousing game of figure skating sounds about as fun as suggesting a rousing game of bridge, I don’t see that happening too much.

Conclusion

If Deca Sports crams in a few more surprisingly innovative games like figure skating into the package - possibly with curling, archer or basketball - and avoids more generic stuff like badminton and beach volleyball, I could actually see it being a worthwhile purchase. Get some fun throw away racers, a few challenging games and a few others for the party people and it comes out to be at least a worthy addition to the fun of Wii Sports.