Deca Sports, in trying to capitalize off of the success of Wii Sports, fails to succeed in replicating the things that made Wii Sports so much fun in the first place.  It is a collection of ten small sports games that fail both to be simple, and to be fun.  The controls are often counterintuitive, and when they’re not, they just don’t work right.  A number of the games seem like clones of other games, and none of them feel particularly polished.

In single player, you are faced with six options.  There are two tournament modes, one for all 10 sports and one for just one sport.  There is a minigame section called “Deca Challenge.” There is a tutorial mode called “Controls” that allows you to practice the different controls in the game, and finally there is a “Locker Room” that allows you to see team profiles and trophies/medals you won.

In this review, I’m going to discuss, or more accurately, complain about, the different minigames and sports that are available.  However, there is a confusing aspect of Deca Sports you must face before you can even play the games, and that is teams.  There are 8 different teams you can choose from, with a different mixture of male and female players and players with speed, balanced, or power attributes.  Why?  They give you no explanation for these teams, and no reason why one team would have an advantage over another team., other than the fact that some players are fast, some are balanced, and some are powerful.  To add to the pointlessness of these teams, in 6 of the 10 sports, you only use one player.  And on the player selection screen, this “speed, balanced, power” turns to “small, medium, large” through some translation oversight, I assume.

THE GAMES

BADMINTON

The controls of the Badminton game are very counterintuitive and non-responsive, two things that will be problems a lot during this review.  In order to hit the birdie, you have to jerk the remote up to hit a short shot, and down to hit a long shot. However, it seemed like the game couldn’t tell the difference between long and short.  Most of the time, the birdie just randomly fluttered to wherever it pleased, not caring whether or not you swung up (which makes no sense anyway) or down.  If volleyball can judge hard or soft swings of the remote to judge hard or soft shots, why can’t badminton also?

Another issue which will continue as a trend in the other games is slow response time.  In badminton, if you hit the birdie while it’s glowing red, you hit a smash shot.  However it takes so long to register your swing that the birdie is no longer red when your character hits it.  Thus, hitting a smash shot is a matter of guessing when the birdie is going to glow and swinging a second beforehand.  Rather silly, if you ask me.

The final problem with badminton was the camera perspective.  It looks like they were going for isometric but ended up with camera-floating-somewhere-behind-you.  It makes it very difficult to judge whether to hit the birdie left or right, and even more difficult in multiplayer, because the players on the far court are facing the other direction.

KART RACING

The controls in Kart Racing make perfect sense.  Hold the remote like a steering wheel and steer it to steer.  However, they manage to be both too responsive and not responsive enough.   When I’m trying to drive straight, the kart wiggles all over the track.  When I’m trying to make a hard turn, the kart happily drifts a little and continues to go straight.  If my corner turns were as sharp as my accidental ones, the game would be a lot easier.

The addition of CPU players in Kart Racing brings about another important flaw of this game.  The computer players are REALLY GOOD.  Even on weak, they sped away at the beginning and I never saw them again until they lapped me. Also, having played a number of really awesome Kart Racing games (namely Mario Kart,) the extremely bland racetrack that felt just like a racetrack was very unappealing.

CURLING

I love curling.  This and badminton were the two reasons I was so looking forward to this game.  While it manages to be a little fun, it also suffers from counterintuitive and badly designed controls.  In order to curl the stone you have to hold down B to kneel, bringing up a speed gauge that moves up and down.  You then thrust the remote forward at the desired time, throwing the stone at the (hopefully) correct speed.  This seems to make sense, except that it registers your thrust when you STOP moving the remote forward, not when you start.  Therefor, if you get very into the game (god forbid) and make a very aggressive thrust forward, it’s actually possible for the meter to have gone all the way up and all the way back down again before it registers the movement.

SNOWBOARDING

Snowboarding suffers from the same blandness as kart racing. It is simply a white snow slope, with no interesting features.  This is probably the most fun of the ten sports, but also the shortest.  The race is only about 30-40 seconds on the easier mode, and the computers aren’t TOO much better than you.  However the controls are mildly awkward.  To accelerate forward, you have to tilt the remote down, and then to steer you have to tilt it left or right.  This sounds perfectly natural, but your elbow and wrist won’t like it very much (if you don’t believe me, try it. It hurts after a short while).

ARCHERY

This game is actually sort of fun, and if it weren’t for two major design flaws, it would be the best game in Deca Sports.  First of all is the design of your aiming device.  It is a thick red square with a half vertical line at the center.  I suppose the arrow flies to the top of the line.  However, the bullseye of the target is ALSO red.  What happens when a thick red line meets a big red circle? You don’t see ANYTHING. Also, what happens when a thick red box stays the same size as the target shrinks? It becomes larger than the target.  How are you supposed to aim with a crosshairs that’s larger than your entire target?

SUPERCROSS

Supercross plays exactly like kart racing, only the track is narrower, so the already loose controls create even more of a problem.  Since there are jumps in a supercross track, they added a useless tilting mechanic to “straighten out” your racer.  I don’t understand the point of this, since you can’t do any kind of tricks, and don't tilt unless you actually try to.  It seems like they threw in the tilt to make it at least a LITTLE different from kart racing.  There’s absolutely no reason to use it, unless you stop paying attention and put your arms down (which happened to me once).

VOLLEYBALL

I don’t know what they were thinking with the camera in volleyball. It’s about 20 degrees left from being directly behind the front court team, making it extremely difficult for player two to see their players at all.  The controls in this are the same as badminton, for the most part, but make more sense in context.  You jerk the remote up to set the ball and down to spike the ball. However spiking the ball in a certain direction just plain doesn’t work.  You are supposed to be able to move the controller left or right to hit the ball left or right, except it seems to pick left or right at random and not really care about how you’re moving it.

FIGURE SKATING

While this was loading I was trying with all my might to figure out how figure skating could possibly work.  I suppose it’s an interesting idea, although only fun once or twice until you realize that it’s the same thing.  Essentially your skater, controlled with the nunchuck joystick, is supposed to follow a path of dots that disappear like pacman food as they skate over them.  Every once and a while, in time with the music you select (difficulty in disguise!), there is an “element” where you jerk the remote up when your skater enters the center of a circle.  You continue to follow this path jumping at your elements until the end of the song.  There is really nothing wrong with the control scheme, only the flawed mechanic that there are 3 different routines to choose from which continue to be the same.

BASKETBALL

One of the few sports where there seems to be clear advantage to fast, balanced, and powerful players (or small, medium, large depending on what screen you believe).  However, the speed aspect is entirely neutralized by the fact that the player with the ball moves about twice as slowly as any o the others.  The power aspect is also useless because of a steal-happy CPU.  The shot mechanism actually sounds fun: you move the remote up to jump and then down at the peak of your jump to make the shot.  However this suffers from the same controller lag that makes spikes in badminton and volleyball impossible – when you are the top of your jump and flick the remote down, by the time it registers the movement you are halfway back to the floor.

SOCCER

Soccer has some potential, but like basketball, suffers from the same drawbacks.  When your player has the ball, they run horrifically slow.  This, coupled with the ridiculously easy "steal" mechanic makes the game a frustrating back and forth stealing fest with very few goals.  You control the player with the ball, and when you are on defense you get to choose who you control on the fly.  However your computer controlled team seem to run around like chickens with their heads cut off.  Also, only a player you control can take the ball.  So in order to pick up a stray ball you have to control the player running toward it. This is very frustrating.

MINIGAMES!!!

When I saw that there were minigames I got very excited.  The minigames section was in fact my favorite part of Wii Sports.  They were fun, as much, if not more entertaining than the actual games, and also managed to make you better at the corresponding sport.  These minigames certainly accomplish the 3rd of those, mostly because they are just practice.  There is just one minigame for each sport, and six of the ten are simply the actual game, with the opponent removed.

All of these minigames suffer from two common flaws.  The goal is to break a pre-set high score, all of which are OUTRAGEOUSLY high, and there are three difficulties, which all seem to be hard, harder, and hardest.

BADMINTON

The goal of this game is to hit the birdie into different zones that light up on the court.  A legitimate minigame, if the directional controls actually worked.  It is unbelievably difficult to do, simply because the birdie does not go where you hit it.

KART RACING

This isn’t a minigame, it’s a time trial.  Not only is it just a time trial, but even on beginner, you have to have a near perfect race to break the “goal time” (I never managed to do it).

CURLING

This minigame could be a lot of fun, if it didn’t suffer from the same ridiculous control problem as the regular curling game.  You have to stop the stone in different target zones, worth different point values. However again since it registers when you stop your thrust, instead of start, the more fun you have with it the less accurate it will be.

SNOWBOARDING

A time trial is NOT a minigame!

ARCHERY

Another legitimate mini game.  You have to hit a progressively shrinking target.  This would be fine, if it weren’t for the consistently large crosshairs you are stuck with.  At level four, the target was just a small dot at the tip of the vertical line in your giant crosshairs.  The game’s high score is SIXTEEN.

SUPERCROSS

A TIME TRIAL IS NOT A MINIGAME

VOLLEYBALL

Again, this is the same “hit the ball onto the targets” game as badminton, and since volleyball and badminton are essentially the same game on different surfaces (in Deca Sports, not for real) it suffers from the same impossible controls. There’s just no way to succeed at this minigame if the game doesn’t know what direction you’re trying to hit.

FIGURE SKATING

At first, you might think that this is a legitimate mini game.  You have to skate the same pac-man esque course, catching all the dots in 30 seconds.  However when you think about it, that’s exactly the same as the regular figure skating game, minus the jumps that make it cool.

BASKETBALL

Similar to figure skating, this is the regular game without half of the game.  Try to make as many shots as you can in 100 seconds isn’t a minigame, it’s practice.  Not to mention the fact that the computer’s high score is 100 points in 100 seconds. That’s one basket every two seconds. It takes about that long to catch the ball and shoot it again.  What’s the point in making unachievable difficult high scores?

SOCCER

Score as many goals as you can before the goalie catches the ball. Again, that’s just soccer without the defense. Why is this a minigame? It’s just practice

CONCLUSION

Deca Sports is a disjointed collection of sports games that fails to measure up to Wii Sports in every aspect.  The controls somehow manage to both be counterintuitive and overly simplified.  There is an abysmal lag time between Wiimote gestures and them being reflected onscreen, and when some of the game’s moves require timing with onscreen cues, it becomes extremely frustrating.  The minigames are just simplified versions of the original game with one or more pieces missing, to make it seem different.  And then there is the ultimate test – fun factor.  Not one time, during any of the games, in multiplayer with my friends, against the CPU, and any of the minigames, did anyone EVER say “that was fun, let me play it again.”