Sometimes it’s the little things that indicate how much care has been taken in the creation of a game. Of course, the big things are also important, and if a game fails in both the big small facets of game design, it looks a lot like the Wii racing game Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, a game apparently made by people who just really didn’t care.
One little thing the game does wrong involves the menu navigation system. Like most Wii racing games, the default control scheme involves holding the Wii remote sideways as though it’s a racing wheel and accelerating by pressing the “2” button. Because the “2” button is the most convenient button to press, it is also always used as the “confirm” button when navigating menus. But not in Pursuit, which uses the A button, the button conventionally used as “confirm” in games in which the remote is held upright.. It is as though menu navigation was done by someone who assumed the game was using a different control scheme.
That’s a little thing, just like the absence of a first person driving view. Racing games always have a view through the windshield, but like the last Need for Speed game, this one does not. When I race in video games, I like to feel like I’m really driving a race car, not like I’m controlling an RC car.
Yet another small but telling detail involves crashes. In the game you speed along freeways and sometimes crash into oncoming vehicles or the road’s cement bunkers. Sometimes when this happens, the whole game goes into a dramatic slow motion. At least it would be dramatic if there were anything spectacular in the animation, which doesn’t even try to give you the metal-buckling, out-of-control crash you would expect. But more than that, the slow motion seems to occur randomly. A hard core crash into an oncoming car often doesn’t trigger this slow motion view, but a glancing blow against a bunker will. Rather than creating excitement and a sense of action, this just generates puzzlement.
If Pursuit only failed in the little things it would be a mediocre game, but it also doesn’t do well in the big things, like steering and graphics. While one doesn’t expect amazing graphics from a Wii game, Pursuit doesn’t seem to even try, offering very bland tracks and scenery (publisher Electronic Arts foolishly raised the expectations for the game's graphics with unrealistic screenshots and videos). And the remote works fine as a steering wheel as long as you don’t rotate it more than 90 degrees; after that the game gets confused and the car sometimes stops turning.
This is not to say that the game is terrible. It is a racing game on a platform with very few racing games, and it offers the basic amusement of trying to drive really fast. It has a decent basic design, with power-ups that can repair your car or interfere with your opponents and a few different racing modes. The flaws are many, but none are really game breaking. It's not so much a bad game as a lazy one, a half-hearted effort along the lines of the series of racing games based on the Pixar cartoon Cars. It's kind of fun, at least for a while, and if this were a budget title I would say that it was worthwhile for those wanting a basic racing game for $20 or $30 bucks.
But Electronic Arts has the gall to ask $50 for Pursuit. This is only $10 less than they are asking for the critically acclaimed versions of the game for the PS3 and Xbox 360, which were developed by a different studio, and since Amazon is actually discounting both those versions, it is actually more expensive to buy the bad Wii version than the other, better versions.
And charging $50 for a game worth half that is not, by any means, a little thing.
