Summer Sports: Paradise Island (Wii)

While the sensation that was the Wii drew in plenty of developers looking to capitalize on its popularity with a wider audience than typical video game players, the pack-in title Wii Sports hampered what could have been their easy avenue to success. When it came to harnessing the motion controls for something accessible and appealing to the masses, Wii Sports already had obvious routes like bowling, tennis, and golf covered, and while you could make more in-depth versions of these sports to try and compete, to turn over a game quickly while still having broad appeal required looking elsewhere. There were still plenty of sports Wii Sports didn’t include after all, and that’s how Summer Sports: Paradise Island hoped to catch the eye of casual gamers.

With the theme of an island getaway full of outside activities, up to four players can play the 7 sports on offer, with computer controlled players able to fill any slots that aren’t occupied by a human being. While many of the sports on offer are meant to be enjoyed for the simple competitions they are, players can also build profiles up with accolades, special conditions such as shutting out an opponent in a game or performing a tricky maneuver helping them build up their profile’s title. With a decent batch of diverse, sporty people to pick before plunging in, the minimum for an acceptable framework to the experience was certainly achieved, and had the sports been solid or even just decent on the whole, this could have maybe been a nice supplement to Wii Sports. Unfortunately, the sports on offer here are a very mixed bag.

The game has two versions of basketball to pick from, although the only difference between these two modes is the court they take place on. Basketball doesn’t actually play like the team sport it’s best known as, there never actually being more than one player on the court at all in Summer Sports. Instead, the two versions of basketball just contain three options for different shooting challenges. You can play Horse, where players can move about half the court and have to set up shots, the other players having to follow suit as well as mimicking the shot type like a bank shot or rimless swish if the player manages to call it before they sink the shot. There’s an Around the World challenge where you take turns shooting from predetermined areas around the net, continuing on if you manage to score and able to gamble after a miss to either try and again and move forward or fall back if you fail, the goal being to get a point from every position. Lastly, a mode where players just fire off as many shots as they can from a still position while a shot clock ticks down challenges players to get as many points as possible in the timeframe. A common issue with the controls of these sports games become apparent here, as the way you throw your basketball in this section of the game feels obtuse and your influence on the ball hard to gauge. It sort of approximates how you might throw a basketball, but determining how much power is needed or what makes the shot go long is difficult, and the game’s incessant AIRBALL animation and bomb dropping sound effect if you were nowhere near the net can grate on the nerves. While simplifying a sport to be accessible through the Wii remote controller is a must, there’s just not enough obvious control over the actions on screen to justify playing these mild shooting challenges, especially when the computer players won’t have to struggle with bad controls to outscore you.

Luckily, the other sports on offer don’t feel stripped down to work with the Wii remotes. Some do, however, have some limitations to them. For example, badminton and volleyball are both on offer here, but neither one allows the player to control where the players are standing. All the movement is handled by the game, but it does at least give your characters the proper hustle needed to get to where they need to be to potentially hit the ball or shuttlecock. Both use similar engines, with things like a player able to control their computer partner in doubles and being able to press A to do a super strong hit when a meter is full carrying between both sports, but they both have ups and downs the other doesn’t. Volleyball is the more responsive of the two, it being fairly easy to bounce the ball between players and get a volley going, although it can get dry very quickly as the only real disruption to this will be passing to a partner for a spike or using the super spike when its charged. Badminton deals with this in a way that is both frustrating and, in an odd sort of way, makes it much more appealing and interesting. In Badminton, you only get one swing when the shuttlecock is on your side of the court, and if you do it before it is within reach of your racquet, your characters will freeze and refuse to try again. This all or nothing approach, especially in doubles where you’d think one character could try and save it normally, adds a weird level of tension to the affair, and unlike in volleyball, you seem to have a lot more control over your shot. It is still hard to gauge your influence on the shuttlecock fully, but it is possible to learn how not to swing to avoid getting out of bounds, and the need to accommodate that with only having one chance to swing means that while it’s not a decent badminton simulation, it still has a weird compelling challenge to it if you can embrace that frustrating rigidity instead of just accepting it as the poor design it technically is.

Luckily, few other sports require you to twist bad mechanics into some interesting limitation. Croquet is just a completely solid transition of the sport to the Wii, the game offering three arrangements of the wickets and a pretty easy to understand power meter despite it not being too easy to lightly tap a ball due to minor detection issues. Association rules are used, such as gaining extra strokes by hitting other balls with your own, and guiding your ball around the courses with your mallet is probably the most undeniably stable simulation of a real life sport on offer here. All the alternating sports on offer here feature the ability to taunt your opponent during their turn by pressing the D pad, and while it has some properly distracting noises that emit from the Wii remote speaker like an air horn and some weird choices like a baby giggling or distant footsteps, there’s also the odd choice of a bone-chilling banshee shriek that feels very out of place in a game that otherwise goes for a relaxing island atmosphere with its music and sound.

Horseshoes and lawn darts come out in a similarly decent state to croquet, although just like volleyball and badminton, they were clearly built from the same groundwork as each other before their associated rules lead to the small adjustments. A round of horseshoes involves two players competing by tossing two horseshoes, only one earning points by either being close enough to the stake or getting ringers. Players will play rounds until they hit the score cap, with double points rounds cropping up to give some comeback potential to the losing player, but there is an oddity that drags the experience down slightly. While you can get a decent gauge for the strength needed when throwing the horseshoe, the camera works against you at first until you understand it. When the shoe is landing near the stake, the camera will seamlessly flip to show you a perspective from either side of it, making it seem like you keep landing short when instead you were now viewing it from the other side since your shot went long. Making this more clear or choosing a better perspective would allow the player to better adjust, but you can at least identify this quirk and work around it. Lawn darts is a bit more simple, the same throwing mechanics carrying over despite the addition of wind and having a much wider target area. Based on if you land in or near the bullseye, both players can now get points in a round, but there is one strange oddity. A seagull will fly above the target carrying a sign with a 5 on it, potentially being the more difficult but rewarding target if you can hit it… but it always seems mistimed so it is impossible to hit. If the bird is ignored, it is pretty traditional lawn darts, joining horseshoes and croquet in being a decent simulation, and while the game wants you to play four player, thankfully, all sports except badminton and volleyball allow fewer players if you want a smaller contest.

Basketball is a wash, volleyball and badminton are either boring or oddly restrictive, and croquet, lawn darts, and horseshoes are decent despite some quirks, so while things definitely lean to a lower quality title so far, there is still one game left that could swing things: mini-golf. And unfortunately, mini-golf might be the biggest tragedy of the title, as clearly the most love went into it and it had the most potential, but the execution is just too sloppy. On the good side, mini-golf takes the players through 9 surprisingly elaborate themed holes. While small in size to mirror the sport of their inspiration, mini-golf will take players to areas themed around horror, the old west, dinosaurs, and even Area 51. Hazards can include something simple like the spinning ship wheel in the pirate level or something off the wall like a giant animate sphinx blowing wind on the course, and shortcuts can involve things like launching yourself into a TNT barrel to get blasted towards the hole or a guillotine that will drop down and block a path in the medieval level. Unfortunately, the same swinging mechanics from croquet come to mini-golf, and while their quirks weren’t as troublesome in a game where players are aiming to finish something first by getting through small arches, the focus on winning in as few strokes as possible that comes with golf means the unreliable power meter drags down the courses here. Putting is a battle with the game detecting your swing, and telling what the game considers a chip and what is just a really strong swing is a losing battle. You can still play a competent game on most courses, but the frustration of fighting with the game just to read your swing and getting extra strokes added to your score for it hampers your enjoyment and the potential competitive angle.

One even bigger problem with mini-golf though is that it’s the glitchiest sport of the bunch. Almost all the sports have the risk of running into small bugs or errors, but none are as harmful as the ones found here. For example, sometimes in basketball you might get a point for only brushing the net with your ball, but the need to get so many total means a free shot isn’t too big a problem. In volleyball, characters rarely actually touch the ball when playing, but this is a visual flaw and you can still time your hits correctly. In mini-golf though, there is a host of potential errors that can change the game. Environmental objects are meant to go transparent when they block your view of a shot, but sometimes they don’t. If your golfer ends up in a weird spot like near the dropping guillotine, they may get launched out of the level and fall into the abyss, only able to escape by taking a stroke after which everyone’s balls will have changed positions. Sometimes, you can even take a free swing before your turn has officially started, your golfer now drifting in the putting position behind their ball as it moves around on its own. The computer players can even go completely bonkers, slamming their ball against the same wall over and over as they misidentify the path to the hole. You’re likely to encounter some unintentional problem during mini-golf on top of its flawed controls, so the one area the game clearly put the most love into is sadly also the one prone to the most issues.

THE VERDICT: The assemblage of sports found in Summer Sports: Paradise Island range from decent to awful. While games like lawn darts and horseshoes are fairly good conversions of the real sports despite their single odd quirks and croquet is pretty much exactly what it should be, the other sports in this collection struggle with more than just the game’s issues reading the Wii Remote’s more subtle motions. Basketball is a bunch of sloppy shooting drills, volleyball stagnates incredibly quickly, and badminton is only enjoyable if you mentally justify its restrictions as part of the challenge. Mini-golf is the biggest missed opportunity though, the detailed courses having the potential to be fun but the bad controls and glitches that plague most of these games hitting this mode the hardest. Overall, this package of summer sports has a few good points, but it doesn’t have anything strong enough to overcome its many little issues.

And so, I give Summer Sports: Paradise Island for Wii…

A BAD rating. Summer Sports: Paradise Island is definitely a split package, but unfortunately, that split is mostly between outright bad games and the somewhat decent ones. If all you need in life is an acceptable Wii transition of games like croquet, horseshoes, or lawn darts, you’ll find their versions here to be enjoyable enough despite the little problems in reading your motions. Even with mini-golf, when things are working right, the courses are impressive and getting in range of the hole is often a decent enough process, but when it comes time to putt or you accidentally stumble into that mode’s propensity for glitchiness, things suddenly switch from decent fun to a troublesome time. With basketball’s awful sense of control, badminton’s weird limitations, and volleyball’s unfortunately basic design, this back end of bad sports means most of the collection tips towards flawed design, and with three croquet courses and just the simple enjoyment of tossing shoes and darts to counterbalance them, it can’t quite pull itself out of the hole for even a mild recommendation.

The small successes do salvage Summer Sports: Paradise Island from being an all-around failure though, and if you can keep your friends from becoming curious about the other modes, you might be able to whip it out from some virtual croquet fun. Don’t expect this to be a trip to paradise by any means though, as glitches and control problems are always waiting to drag down even the better elements of the game.