MY FIRST DAY AT THE WII SPORTS RESORT: A CAUTIONARY TALE IN SIX PHOTOS
This morning I find myself nicely surprised by my local friendly FedEx deliverer, who drops off a package containing one (1) blue flower lei, one (1) Wii AIRLINES ticket from “my living room” to “Wii Sports Resort, Wuhu Island”, and one (1) copy of the game and new Wii MotionPlus accessory.
Amanda Visell’s Salaryphant and Tado’s Ye Olde English Traveler seem a bit nervous about the impending flight, but they’re always fretting about something: what could possibly go wrong?
First thing’s first: throw caution to the wind and extract the MotionPlus from those damned rubber jackets Nintendo continue to insist we use. You think I honestly don’t have the motor skills to keep a controller in my hand without flinging it haphazardly through a window? I’m a grown man.
The first thing you see on booting Wii Sports Resort for the first time: an appropriately in-flight-esque three minute video instructing you on how to connect and disconnect your MotionPlus accessory, all making proper use of and interweaving your wrist-strap through the rubber jacket, of course. At this point, I’m starting to feel slightly chided for having tossed my jacket aside.
But then, ha, ha, no mind! It’s me, it’s my Mii, all kitted out in high-altitude skydiving gear, doing my final harness checks. I remember this from the E3 conference!
And so, in due course, I make my initial dive toward the ‘Wuhu’ Isles, linking and unlinking hands with a few of James Kochalka’s Monster Miis as we plummet in unison and graceful formation.
And as we land, all seems well. I ace my first sword fight like a pro, and the puppy that’s taunted me so many times before on Wii Fit jogs shows similar confident panache and fantastic skill at fetching my clumsily tossed frisbees.
That’s when I remember the game Nintendo also demonstrated at their conference: the three-point line basketball toss. Let’s give that a whirl, I think — and so I bring the WiiMote down to retrieve a ball, and swing upward rapidly as instruc–
This is when several things happen all at once. In retrospect, I believe the sequence of events goes: my WiiMote — given just that extra inch of MotionPlus length it never had before, and me having not fully taken into consideration just how tall I actually am — comes into contact with a fan blade on my ceiling fixture, in turn knocking the controller and my hand into one of the lightbulb encasings, which shatters with a wicked crack, and proceeds to shower me with broken glass.
It is at this point that I begin to bleed, one might not say profusely, but with intent and purpose, a full-on steady trickle if certainly not a gush, and my mind flashes that how on earth did I, and, oh my god, I have, I’ve just become one of those people — those people that have accidents with their Wiis and blog photos of the ‘mote-butt-end emerging from their TV tubes, the living baby-blue silhouette of that now ubiquitous warning message showing people flailing into nearby end-table lamps.
And so, day one of my Wii Sports Resort visit sees me unceremoniously carried limp and dazed from its courts, now forever slightly gun-shy about losing myself so completely to its instinctively direct-mapped movements, in lieu of remaining hyper-aware of my immediate surroundings: a victim to and of the virtual.
See more posts about: Offworld Originals
