I got a chance to play Wii Table Tennis today, and I have to say this is a very poor approximation of Table Tennis.
At first glance, it's innocent enough, but I can't keep playing, I'm getting too stone cold furious at how many bad habits your little Mii avatar has, how little control you truly have over him, and how many games this has costed me and being able to spot the exact mistake my Mii made that caused it.
Generally, you character only has 8 basic Table Tennis moves at his disposal: Forehand push, F-Drive, F-Chop, Backhand punch, B-Drive, and B-Chop and F and B Smashes. Calling those drives or chops though is a little generous, since your Mii doesn't make the correct hand motion to impart as much spin as he does. Forehand and backhand flicks, blocks, drops, scoops, and loops are not represented at all; and while your Mii displays good shakehand posture, apparently Pen-holder style doesn't even exist.
I will say that I was a tad disappointed in the complete lack of a formal tutorial for any of the games, and so had to look up a more detailed lowdown for the controls proper. Upon doing this however, I was disappointed to find that to do your basic drives and chops, you have to twist your hand as you hit the ball. While I can understand that this is supposed to be a similar game to Wii Tennis, I would appreciate it if the game weren't instilling such a bad idea as to how Table Tennis works. In real Table Tennis, you CAN'T twist your wrist mid-stroke, it just doesn't work. You lose all sense of paddle control and direction, and the only thing you'll accomplish is sending the ball straight up, or down into the net or table.
Then finally, your Mii is just plain lazy. While he can backpedal just fine; if you would like him to skedaddle his sorry ass from one side of the table to the other, I can tell you right it isn't going to happen anytime soon with the old man shuffle he's been programmed to use. Furthermore, when the tempo of the ball has him pushed to the far side of any part of the table, the smartest thing to do is to hurry back to neutral position in the middle, but NOPE! Gonna stay way over there and make himself easy to get tricked by an alternating side shot... and OH MY GOD if you make him exert himself just slightly too hard to hit the ball that's outside of his grandpa shuffling radius, he'll leap for it and FUBAR it completely regardless of your input stroke, sending the ball into a lofty trajectory that any moron could smash back for the point.
And yes, leaping from one side of the table to the other and still performing a clean hit is a skill that needs to be practiced at; a skill that Miis have no grasp of whatsoever.
/Table Tennis Buff
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Topic: Things that made you sad today thread. (Read 9431731 times)