Revolutionary: Progress Wiiport, Part 2

Every Tuesday, Mike Sylvester brings you REVOLUTIONARY, a look at the wide world of Wii possibilities.

When I first tested my balance board, I was in a bit of a hurry to find a suitable game with which to demonstrate it. I found a demo for a snowboarding game called Stoked Rider, but in my haste, I failed to realize that this was the long-outdated original version, and there had since been a sequel entitled Stoked Rider: Alaska Alien. Sporting far better graphics, and a more advanced gameplay engine which encorporates detailed physics, it seemed like it could give me reason enough to dust off the balance board and see what more could be done with it.

One thing that's not apparent from any of my videos is how much time I've spent playing the games. To test a script, I may play the same part of a game dozens of times before I roll the camera. For games that use motion sensing, the process can put a lot of strain on the body if the script isn't tuned for subtle movements, and starting out, my scripts usually require exaggerated movements. In the beginning stages of testing my Panzer Dragoon script, an hour of play would make my wrist would go numb, and I knew that the script was finally good when I could stand to play it for longer sessions.

Bringing the balance board into the equation takes the stress off my wrists, but distributes it across the rest of my body. My experience with Stoked Rider the first time around was more frustrating than I let on. For the 5 minutes of video you saw, I shot a whole hour. I'd tested it for a few hours before that, but during filming I was still trying to learn the mechanics of the game, while trying to learn how to use my balance board, while trying to tune the script for the most comfortable and responsive use of the balance board in the game. The ordeal gave new meaning to the phrase "balancing act," but in the end I wasn't soured enough that I wouldn't want to give it another shot.

I installed Alaska Alien and was pleased to see how much the graphics were improved. Shader-iffic bump mapping on the snow and the rider's clothes added texture and depth, and the polygon counts were upped to "next gen" levels. A little YouTube research made me aware that the rider now had a ragdoll body controlled by a simulation of physics, and the control options showed that I could take control of the rider's balance separate to controlling the steering of his snowboard. But the basic control scheme hadn't changed from Stoked Rider, so I loaded up my original GlovePIE script and took to the slopes.

As you can see, I'm not doing a lot of moving, but my in-game avatar is responding with amplified motions. What looks like a fun run is actually an exercise in frustration, as I didn't feel like I had any control over the little green bugger. After several runs with similar or worse results, I was about ready to quit when I remembered that I could also control the rider's balance independent of the snowboard's steering.

I took a minute to switch around the controls in the script - mapping the Nunchuk joystick to the steering and using balancing to lean my avatar on the snowboard. At first it felt like it was going to be as calamitous as the old scheme. I was all over the place and my Alien was getting his poor frail body pulverized on every rocky outcropping below, lateral, or above him on the mountainside. But after a few tries, I got the hang of counterbalancing against the steering, and using more subtle movements, I was able to control well enough to successfully clear a challenge. My little outburst of elation in the video is genuine, as it was after that run that I really started believing in the possibility of a peripheral like my balance board helping to enrich the gaming experience.

There are some people that believe motion controls have to be at the center of the Wii gaming experience. Here I've proven to myself, if not to you readers as well, that they can be used to compliment more traditional controls without feeling tacked on or gimmicky. If I wasn't fearful of taking a tumble and tearing a Mike-shaped hole in my projector screen, I'd definitely play some more to master this control scheme and the game.

I do expect I'll be trying more games with my balance board in the future. In fact, I planned to play Wakeboarding Unleashed featuring Shaun Murray for this week's feature, but one of my installation discs is MIA, and I didn't think quickly enough to check for a demo. I'm still open to suggestions for games you'd like to see played with the balance board, so please leave a comment!