EA Games held a preview event last night in Manhattan, showing off the company's latest big-name games, from The Simpsons Game to Half-Life 2: Orange Box. While most of the action took place on the various screens around the room, my eyes were drawn to a large, funky-shaped piece of white plastic at the Metal of Honor Heroes 2 display. They had an actual Wii Zapper set up to demonstrate the game's on-rails shooter-style Arcade mode. I couldn't resist the chance to try Nintendo's new Wii peripheral, not scheduled to hit stores until November.
The Wii Zapper is fundamentally just a white plastic shell in which you place your Wiimote and nunchuk and hold like a machine gun. That said, it's a very nice white plastic shell in which you place your Wiimote and nunchuk and hold like a machine gun. It feels solid, and both controller parts fit snugly into the device with no noticeable wiggling. A trigger on the front of the Zapper counts as its only moving part, activating the Wiimote's B button when pressed.
Medal of Honor: Heroes 2
I used the Zapper to play Medal of Honor Heroes 2 in its arcade mode, a variant that feels more than a little like Time Crisis. The Wiimote picked up some interference from the numerous other Wiis and light sources in the room (a problem you probably would only experience at an event like this), but once I got the hang of it, the Zapper control worked pretty well. It felt relatively comfortable while I aimed at the screen and shot at Nazi soldiers. While Arcade mode felt well enough, I can imagine more traditional FPS gameplay feeling disorienting to get used to, with the nunchuk and its analog stick mounted on the back of the Zapper.
Like I said before, though, the Zapper is just a plastic shell and aiming with it didn't feel very much different from aiming with the Wiimote as usual. You still have to point the Wiimote at the screen and adjust your shot for wherever you put the sensor bar. It feels pretty cool and gun-like, but it doesn't really change the gaming experience.
Granted, I only played with the Zapper for a few minutes, and with only one game. Future Zapper-compatible games might take advantage of the accessory to provide some as-yet unheard-of change to gameplay. The $20 device comes with a Zelda-themed crossbow target game, too, so it's not like you're dropping a Jackson on only a piece of plastic. Either way, I'm not ready to either condemn or worship the Nintendo Wii Zapper yet. It might be fun, or it might be a useless gimmick. We'll find out in November.
(Credit:
EA)
The WWII shooter genre is about as overworked as a game meme can be, with virtually identical games having suspiciously similar names, such as Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, or Hour of Victory. The Medal of Honor series, which dates all the way back the original PlayStation, breaks away from the pack with a surprisingly refreshing take on the theme.
Instead of planting you, as a well-armed soldier, at point A in some generic European town and forcing you to fight through waves of Axis soldiers on your way to point B, MoH: Airborne sets up the map, shows you a series of objectives, and then leaves it up to the player to figure out how to get the job done.
The levels each start with a parachute jump, and you can aim yourself to land practically anywhere (although only a few areas, marked by green smoke grenades, are considered safe). Computer-controlled comrades generally follow you around, but the different objectives (blow up a munitions dump, knock off a high-ranking officer, etc.) are usually at opposite ends of the map and can be tackled in any order. Meet a grisly end, and you parachute back in and can choose a new landing location to continue the fight from another angle.
(Credit:
EA)
Playing through a few levels of this work-in-progress, we decided to leave the street-level gunfight to the AI soldiers and instead found a walkway we could use to jump onto a rooftop. Scrambling along the rooftops of the town, we were able to avoid most of the enemies and crawl in through a second-story window of the building we were trying to infiltrate--an option we never would have seen from the ground.
Other than the open-ended maps, this is still a pretty standard WWII first-person shooter, and won't turn you onto the genre if you're allergic to History Channel fare. But EA at least gets points for not just turning out another rote sequel.
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