Wii Play: Motion - Two-Player Pose Mii Plus

This is a capture of me and a friend playing the Pose Mii Plus mode of Wii Play: Motion for the Wii. This was recorded directly from my Wii (not the Wii U). I'm player one and Drew is player two.

After Nintendo released the Motion Plus accessory alongside Wii Sports Resort in 2009, I started keeping my eye out for additional Motion Plus games. In 2011, Nintendo then released the sequel to Wii Play, which was Wii Play: Motion. Although I (and probably tons of other people) already owned four Wii Remotes, Nintendo only sold this game as a bundle with a Wii Remote Plus, which drove up the retail price.

I had to wait a little while, but I eventually found a seller on Amazon who was selling this game brand new without the bundled controller for a decent price. So I got the game around a month or so after it was released. I ultimately found the game to be rather enjoyable, but some of the mini-games felt incredibly strange and quirky.

It turned out that Nintendo had farmed out development of the Wii Play sequel to various third parties by holding a competition to see who could produce the best mini-games. The winners were then selected for inclusion in the final game. This means that Nintendo didn't even feel like creating a sequel in-house despite the massive sales of the first game.

A few of the game modes suffer as a result, and some of them don't even seem to utilize the Motion Plus accessory much at all since they appear to rely on the basic tilt function of the standard Wii Remote. Overall though, I think Wii Play: Motion is a pretty good sequel with a few innovative uses of Motion Plus.

In this video Drew and I played the Pose Mii Plus mode, which is an expansion upon the Pose Mii mode in the original Wii Play. Instead of merely detecting rotation and X/Y-axis location, Pose Mii Plus detects rotation on a full three-dimensional axis. I think it's a really good implementation of the Motion Plus accessory. This mode was probably inspired by certain Japanese game shows where contestants have to contort themselves into certain shapes in order to fit through an opening in a moving wall.

The two-player mode contains all of the stages from the single-player mode, but you fly through the gates simultaneously in splitscreen. One benefit to this setup is that you can look at the other person's screen to figure out the correct pose if you're having trouble, and if you're fast enough. This mode took us several attempts to complete, but when we finally beat it, Drew didn't miss any gate whereas I actually screwed up on one.

Recorded with the Hauppauge HD PVR and the Wii's component cables at 60 frames per second.

We're using Wii Remotes with Motion Plus.