Wii Pool Party Review

Techie Certification : Denied

So, i was at Blockbuster on Saturday to see if they had FIFA ’08 for the Wii so i can check it out before shelling out $50.00 for it, they had it.. and they had this game called “Pool Party”. Being a huge Snooker fan, i picked it up to see if in fact it did have Snooker as a game to play, and sure enough, it did! So, i took them both to the counter to take home and check out. Unfortunately the only FIFA ’08 they had in stock, was a damaged disk, so i had to settle jsut for Pool Party.

Got home, turned on the Wii and put the disk in. After a few minutes, i was navigating through its really poorly designed menu’s, and finally started a game of snooker.

So heres my problems with this effort. Snooker is a completely different game from pool. Pool is possibly the easiest game to play on a table, its just way too simplified, but can be a lot of fun with a buddy.

Snooker, is not an easy game. The table is 2 times bigger in all directions, thers a lot more balls on the table and there is some serious tactics required to win the game due to the size of the table, and the rules of the game (which are relatively simple). The problem with this game is that they took the same arcade pool – inaccurate shooting mechanism, and put it into the snooker game play. That simply doesnt work for snooker. The pockets are smaller, hence the angles are a lot more precise. With the wiimote, its possible to get such accuracy – but they chose not to fine tune it for the snooker mode. I’d played Wii Play’s pool mode, which was a ok attempt at trying to get the cue movement into the game for play. This game doesnt even try to do that, so in essence yo ucould be playing this game on an xbox or any other console, and it would be the same, completely wasting the Wii’s spectacular ability for realistic motion. One more thing, after each shot, it gives a summary of what just happened – which really really slows down, a game thats supposed to be slow. So thus, this game is boring.

I didn’t bother playing any of the other modes, i just gave up after getting frustrated.

So my verdict. Boring, frustrating, useless, waste of time, waste of money.

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