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Today and tomorrow I’ll be looking at some family-oriented and kid friendly sports games released on the Nintendo Wii the past week. Today’s Quick Hits segment looks at two games, Academy of Champions: Soccer and Water Sports while tomorrow we’ll have a more detailed review of EA Hasbro’s NERF N-Strike Elite complete with a TSG-Cast episode. While all three of these games are marketed to families and kids, they all possess some crossover appeal to us older gamers. I’m here to let you know if they are worth buying, renting or dismissing altogether.

ACADEMY OF CHAMPIONS: SOCCER
PUBLISHER: UBISOFT
I love arcade sports games – especially when they are simple, challenging and lacking cheap, cheating AI. Ubisoft’s Academy of Champions: Soccer actually accomplishes all three of these tasks, but still comes up a little short in my book.

The game’s premise is sort of a weird crossover between Harry Potter and Bedknobs and Broomsticks (if you recall the soccer scene). There is this Academy (of Champions, you guessed it) which invites youth soccer players from all over to hone their skills and ultimately take down the evil that is Scythemore Academy. Along the way, you’ll play minigames, shop for upgrades, hone your skills, play other traveling teams and develop the ultimate group of players to take down Scythemore. You may even unlock some Ubisoft characters in the form of Rayman, Sam Fisher and Altair.

The story mode is fairly long in length, but rather dry and uneventful. You’ll be repeating simple tasks over and over as you patiently wait for the next game to open up. The game on the pitch looks pretty much the same every time as the stadiums don’t vary all that much until closer to the end. The gameplay itself isn’t too shabby, though the controls are fairly rudimentary (the analog control feels more like 8-way digitial) but it’s simple to learn. The CPU doesn’t ease up just because this game is marketed towards kids either. Towards the end of the first term at school I had already lost a couple games and getting wins (and even scoring) in later stages took some work.

The best thing about this game is the price. $29.99 is right on the button for a game like this. For the price it has a deep story mode, plenty of unlockables and some fun, if simple, arcade soccer.

WATER SPORTS
PUBLISHER: GAMEMILL
This is just one of those Wii games that no one in the general gaming populace really knows or cares about. The game is released, you can’t find it in stores and the stores don’t even know what the title really is or who published the darn thing (i.e. Gamestop’s website lists this game as Water Sports WiFi by Activision – I’m sure Activision would rather not be associated with this sad excuse for a game).

This is where I come in. I can afford to be a little more detail oriented when it comes to covering just sports games (though my definition of the genre is fairly all-encompassing). So I decided to track this title down so I could see what GameMill was hiding deep down in the depths of the gaming ocean.

In this quest I unearthed a good ten minutes of game”play” so to speak. The game booted up, it let me select a character, a level, a particular water sport and let me play through said water sport. It then gave me a high score when I was done with said character participating in said water sport on said level.

That’s it. That’s all there is to this game. Four watersports – kitesurfing, wakeboarding, jetskiing and windsurfing, complete with three sets of two characters (the girls like to jet ski and wakeboarding, while the guys like to do the surfing stuff). Not to mention ugly PS1-era graphics (it would be kind to call this Dreamcast-level stuff) and skiddish, if working, controls. You can play with a friend, you can use the balance board if you wish, all your going for is high scores. Apparently the multiple levels of difficulty that is claimed by the back of the box amounts to two – easy and normal. The best part is the instruction manual, which consists of three pages of actual instructions – though one is dedicated entirely to balance board safety.

I have a feeling this game will be torn into a lot worse than me on other sites. I like to see games for what they are – a simple casual offering will be looked at at face value, not compared directly to epic 40-hour games wielding the production value of a hollywood blockbuster. That said, I still can’t give Water Sports a pass here, not when it shoddily slaps together a 10-minute gameplay experience with no lasting qualities whatsoever. It’s not broken, it’s just not much of anything – and it costs just as much as a pretty decent game I reviewed a few paragraphs ago…how does that happen?