FlingSmash: Sean’s Impressions
I finished up our Wii airstream demo with FlingSmash, a game that is seemingly just more waggle but actually uses Wii gestures to control a decently deep platformer of sorts. You control two spherical heroes on a journey to batter their way through obstacles, puzzles and enemies using their inertia alone. The pinball influences are obvious, and using the Wii MotionPlus and a bit of strategy you can make FlingSmash just about as complex as a good game of pinball.
In fact, you almost have to—while the early levels are simply about swinging the Wii remote like a racket and hurtling your character through bricks, soon you’ll have to hit multiple gems in order to unlock doors, and under a time limit too. Add in powerups like an obligatory multi-ball and a fruit that balloons your characters to many times their normal size and the action can get quite chaotic fast.
FlingSmash is yet another fun co-op game coming out this holiday and once again it’s much better played with a friend. If rumors are to be believed, it will also be bundled with the brand new Wii Remote Plus, a Wiimote that has built-in MotionPlus tech. It’s a good thing too—you can play FlingSmash with a plain old Wiimote, but MotionPlus adds precision and control that make the experience much easier to control.
Hopefully this will finally make MotionPlus take off. Bundling the original Wiimote with Wii Play made that somewhat shallow minigame collection sell like hotcakes during a hotcake shortage on an island of hotcake addicts. People have been less inclined to pick up the MotionPlus dongle, however, but maybe the Wii Play bundle strategy work in reverse. FlingSmash is certainly fun enough to move units. With Zelda Skyward Sword coming early next year, I’m sure Nintendo wants to get MotionPlus into the hands of as many Wii owners as possible, and a game-controller combo seems like the way to go.
