Sports Party is set on a tropical paradise island, where up to four players can compete against one another in nine different disciplines: basketball, croquet, lawn darts, badminton, volley-ball, horse shoes and mini-golf – all which make use of the Wii Remote and Nunchuck’s motion-sensing abilities.

There isn’t a lot else to say about it; although Ubisoft lists one of its key features to be “short gaming sessions”… a reflection on the game’s pick-up-and play nature, or how long you’ll endure what is already becoming a tired format?

“With our new PLAY ZONE party titles, the Wii gamers who like to spend time with friends and family will have fun with the Wii through innovative and involving mini-games. The PLAY ZONE label will provide them with the best games to mingle and compete together in a fun and friendly atmosphere” said John Parkes, Ubisoft’s EMEA Marketing Director.

After Ubisoft showing, disappointingly, its casual gaming priorities for Nintendo platforms at its Ubidays event recently, Sports Party, we feel, isn’t going to do too much to recapture the imaginations of those legions of players feeling let down by the French developer.

And worryingly, this is only the beginning. It’s released on July 11.

source:  http://www.nintendic.com/news/2573

The game jumps between the three main forces of British, American and Polish as they all centre in on Paris in the middle of the Second World War. You are essentially taking part in what already happened about 60 years ago when the Allied forces tried to regain control of France from the Nazi regime, you do this by completing 14 different chapters each with their own separate plot lines that serve little purpose other than to keep the game moving and justify the missions goals. Luckily you won’t be constantly interrupted with cutscenes and dialogue in the game, but rather you’ll just be left do your thing. But as is the case with most World War games, the story is really quite irrelevant as the majority of people playing the game will already know enough about the whole conflict and in the end it is the gameplay that really matters.

If you are looking for a game to show off the Wii’s graphical capabilities with, then this may well be one of the best options from the whole launch line up. While it may be unimpressive to those used to Hi-Def 360 visuals. The environments are something special with destructible scenery and a whole variety of different bombshells, shrapnel and all degrees of rubble lying around helping you feel as though you really are in a battlefield in 1940’s France. The animations add a few nice touches as well, whether it is the clouds of smoke and dirt from an explosion, or the flash of a gun going off that will keep you on the edge of your seat. You won’t be disappointed with the audible side of the game either, with constant noises varying from a bullet flying just past your head to a grenade exploding after you’ve launched it into the Nazi base. As with the other Call of Duty games the music score is exceptional, and at times it is on par with several blockbuster movie scores. The voice overs are also surprisingly good considering many other games hire very unprofessional voice actors and end up with near ridiculous voice overs. As the Wii doesn’t support digital audio you won’t be able to listen to the game through full Dolby 5.1 Surround Sound speakers, but this isn’t by any fault of the developers or the publishers, but does take away from the atmosphere of the game slightly.

The game introduces you to the new control scheme via a tutorial level, which is still one of missions but you are given a lot of guidance in how to play the game. It isn’t complicated at all, you use the analog stick on the nunchuk attachment to move around, much the same as the left analog stick on a normal controller, and to aim and move your view around you just use the WiiMote. The WiiMote essentially acts as your gun in the game, as to fire all you need to do is pull the trigger button, the buttons on the nunchuk are also used for various movements like ducking or jumping. You can either throw a grenade with the press of a button, or for the more adventurous you can make an overarm throwing motion with the nunchuk to lob an explosive at your enemies. Reloading and changing weapons can also be controlled by a quick movement left and right or up and down with the nunchuk. Even though all of these are going to become what is the norm for all Wii FPS there are a couple of nice little additions, like being able to wrestle weapons off your opponents be putting the WiiMote and nunchuk forward together and then yanking them both back at the same time.

The controls may take a little getting used to, but this is the case with all Wii games due to its new controller, it was the same with a lot of the early DS games. But after a few hours of play it will become second nature to even the most experienced FPS gamers. The “bounding box” mechanism, which is similar to that used in Red Steel, is more accurate than dual analog sticks, but not quite as precise as a mouse and keyboard. Once you zoom in the aiming becomes even more accurate and you don’t need to worry about moving around. All the motions are picked up well by the sensor bar, so you won’t need to worry about dying because for some reason you weren’t able to throw a grenade in time.

The main downfall of this game is the lack of any form of multiplayer mode, something that makes the game very enjoyable on the Xbox 360, especially combined with Live. It seems unusual that such a key feature from the previous installments has been left out of the Wii version. It does also mean that you will not be playing the game for as long as you will imagine, most gamers won’t have much left to do after about ten hours of gameplay, and without any multiplayer support you’ll probably have forgotten about Call of Duty 3 within a month.

Call of Duty 3 is an excellent example of Nintendo’s insistence of gameplay over graphics, it is more engaging that it’s bigger PS3 and 360 brothers even if both visually and audibly it isn’t as good as them. With multiplayer the game would have got a far higher score as you can imagine the fun you would have had with three other friends all trying to kill each other. There is very little originality about the game aside from the control scheme, but then again the new controls are reason enough to play this.

One of the few people who bought a Wii Fit in NYC today.

However, confusion began to erupt when Nintendo's nationwide advertising campaign for Wii Fit began touting the game as going on sale on Wednesday, May 21. When queried by GameSpot last week, a representative for Nintendo of America insisted the game would go on sale on May 19. "It may take a few days for shipments to reach every part of the country and the ads you saw may have considered that," said the rep.

Today, Nintendo is holding a Wii Fit launch event in New York City, where it sold the game to a select few. The rest of the country won't be as fortunate. Nintendo made a last-minute announcement today that the May 19 date only applies to only one location--the Nintendo World Store in New York City. According to a "Nintendo World ambassador" manning the phones at the store, the game sold out there in under an hour this morning. However, subsequent reports received by GameSpot say the game was in stock for several hours. A call made to the Nintendo World Store at 3pm EDT/12pm PDT confirmed there were no more units for sale.

Calls to more than a dozen other retailers throughout the country--including ones just blocks away from the Nintendo World Store--produced an uniform result. "The game doesn't come out until Wednesday," was the oft-repeated reply from more than 20 clerks and managers at GameStop, Best Buy, and Target locations on both coasts and in the Midwest. One GameStop employee in San Francisco seemed particularly glum, saying, "We won't even know if we are getting any quantity until Wednesday."

GameSpot queried Nintendo reps about the confusion surrounding the Wii Fit launch, as well as the prospect of shortages--shortages which apparently have led to online retailers such as Amazon ceasing to offer preorders. As of press time, no reply had been received.

For more on Wii Fit, which is already on sale in Europe, Australasia, and Japan--where it has sold 1 million units--check out GameSpot's full review. To learn more about the actual health effects of the game, check out GameSpot editors' collective Wii Fit blog, which will launch later this week.

If you're overweight in real life, expect to see your Mii suddenly adorned with a big beer belly.

The package, which retails for £69.99 in the UK ($138.16), consists of the Wii Fit disc and the new balance board peripheral. The balance board, which is a white wireless pair of electronic scales, measures shifts in weight in order to monitor things such as balance, movement, and pressure. Before it can do that, it needs to be set up to recognise your weight, height, and body mass index, which it can then monitor over time to help you reach your fitness goals.

The setup process is a little bit lengthy, but in traditional Nintendo style there's an element of play involved in finding out just how unhealthy you are. The first step is to choose or create the Mii character who will represent you in the game. This character is then dropped into the Wii Fit menu system and will act as your avatar when you play through the main game. Before that, though, there's some history, mainly about how the world's posture has been deteriorating. Nintendo puts that down to two things: a lack of exercise and age-weakened muscles. As you're warned of fat accumulation and something called metabolic syndrome, the onscreen balance board begins to shake in fear, but there's no need to worry, it assures you--as long as you play Wii Fit every day that is!

After the doom-and-gloom medical warning, it's on to the actual calibration of the machine. Wii Fit uses your height, date of birth, and weight to work out your BMI, against which you're categorised as either underweight, ideal, overweight, or obese. With that taken into account, your Mii character changes to reflect your current BMI, growing a belly for "overweight" or "obese" or shrinking down for "underweight." You can also choose to see your actual weight in stone or kilograms, although only the narcissistic among you may choose to reveal such information. Thankfully, you can password-protect your stats to keep them out of the view of nosy friends.

Wii Fit then issues you your first balance test to work out your athletic ability and Wii Fit age. This involves shifting the emphasis of weight between each leg so that, for example, 60 percent is on your right leg and 40 percent is on your left. The more accurate you are at doing this repeatedly within the 30-second limit, the greater your athletic ability and the lower your Wii Fit age. While playing the game among a number of people, we didn't see anyone attain a Wii Fit age lower than their actual age, and it usually indicated that our physical ability was around 10 years above our actual age.

Thankfully, Wii Fit lets you set a goal for your weight loss or, depending on your condition, weight gain. Wii Fit will advise you of how far you have to go to reach your target BMI, and you can set a weight-change plan to work towards this. The game can recognise if your weight change is unhealthy and will advise you to stick to a plan of changing your weight by only a few pounds every couple of weeks. Nevertheless, you can review your weight-loss plan every fortnight if you want to change your goals, while the game keeps a tally of the amount of time you put into the exercises with the FitPiggy--a piggy bank that collects all the time you've spent working out in the game. New games are unlocked at 10-minute intervals, so you don't have to play for long to open up more challenges.

You can choose either a male or a female trainer. It's uncanny how everyone always picks the opposite sex...

Guiding you through the game is either a male or a female training instructor, whom you can view from different angles in order to fully grasp the moves they perform during exercises. The instructor will also dish out tips based on the feedback the game gets through the balance board. This includes advice to straighten your spine in the yoga class or to slow down during the repetitive muscle exercises. There are four types of exercises in Wii Fit: yoga, muscle workouts, aerobic exercises, and balance games. Each of these categories has four games opened at the start (with the exception of muscle workouts, which has five), and the more you play, the more you can unlock.

The aerobic exercises and balance games are the most traditional gamelike challenges in Wii Fit, although the game does advise you to push yourself in the yoga and muscle workouts categories for the most efficient fat burning. Aerobic exercises include hula hoop, step basics, jogging, and two-player jogging, the latter of which can be played cooperatively as long as you have two Wii Remotes. By putting the remote in your pocket and jogging on the spot, Wii Fit is able to monitor your burn rate and advises you how fast to run to minimise the strain on your muscles. The step basics mode is great fun, testing your sense of rhythm by having you play a basic version of a dance mat game. Jumping on stage with a bunch of other Miis, you have to move on and off the balance board in time to the music, with an onscreen guide showing you when and where your feet should be.

The balance game section contains nine quite tricky games to test your balance, four of which you can play from the off. Two are skiing based: one a slalom and one a jump. Another is based on football, in which you need to move your body to header oncoming balls and miss the pandas and football boots. Table tilt is a fiendishly difficult take on Mercury Meltdown, where you must use your body weight to tilt a maze to get a ball to fall through a hole. It can be incredibly difficult to do this during the later stages with more than four balls onscreen, but it's strangely addictive and very taxing on the legs.

The muscle workouts are where Wii Fit really gets taxing, and with regular use it should have a noticeable effect on your physique. The standard gym favourites are present from the start, including press-ups, twists, and lunges, and you can choose to do a different number of repetitions each time you play. Again, the balance board measures your shift in balance and can tell when you're doing a proper press-up--half-baked efforts will go unrecorded and will result in a lower overall grade. Likewise, the board is very accurate at measuring your wobbly legs as you struggle to adopt the tree position during yoga, and the clear scoring system can make it quite a competitive game to play against your friends.

As well as aiming to improve your overall fitness, Wii Fit highlights your balance and weight distribution, so as to reduce everyday wear and tear on joints and muscles.

The monitoring system keeps track of your daily progress, marking the days you've played as well as any change in your BMI and centre of gravity. The game places an emphasis on good posture, so as well as tracking your overall health, it aims to improve your centre of balance to minimise the stress of everyday life on your body. Graphical representation of the data also makes it easy to see how you're progressing towards your goal, and you can even add exercises done outside of Wii Fit, such as running, swimming, or just plain walking--perfect for those with an active lifestyle...and dirty cheaters.

We really like what we've seen of Wii Fit, and it has enough charm to be both a fun game and a real way of getting more exercise. There's clear scope for the balance board too, as it's another relatively simple peripheral for the Wii with a lot of potential uses. We'd have loved to see some sort of online integration for Wii Fit, with daily tips or the ability to compare progress with friends, but it's still great fun to compete against people locally. Look out for a full review of Wii Fit when it launches worldwide later this month.