Rockstar set up a big black curtained-off area in the front of the Penny Arcade Expo exhibit hall. What wonders did it hold inside? Grand Theft Auto IV? The chopped-up Manhunt 2? As it turns out, none of the above -- inside was the Wii version of Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis.
While it didn't look nearly as good as the original Xbox 360 version (shown right), I'm sure there wasn't a person in attendance who didn't agree this was an excellent idea -- after all, the Wii shot to fame in great part based on a tennis game. But where Wii Sports' tennis game is scaled down from the real thing, Rockstar gives us a much more complex game design. But will players like it? I'm still not sure.
We couldn't really figure out the controls, at first. This sent us to the Pause menu only to discover that there were in fact three different settings. One simply uses the Wiimote. Much like Wii Sports, all your character movement will be handled automatically in this mode, and you use the D-pad to control the movement of the ball when you hit it. Serving is handled by making a pancake-flip motion with the Wiimote, then swinging when a power meter that appears on screen is in the optimal spot. You can do a "focus shot" which slows things down into bullet-time and allows you more accuracy (apparently, we weren't quite sure what it did), by building up your power meter and holding the B trigger when you swing.
The next step up adds in the Nunchuk. Now you can use the joystick to control the placement of the ball when you shoot it, and the D-pad adds spin in the direction you're holding. This is how we played. The final control-freak setting maps movement of your character to the D-pad, so there's something new you have to deal with.
I could be wrong, but I'm not sure that the way you swing the Wiimote affects anything in any of the three control modes. Spin is mapped to the four directions of the D-pad, and ball placement is on the Wiimote. In fact, I started to get the feeling that motion control is only being used here for pure gimmick value, that it's just a generic "swing" that takes the place of a button press. I don't know for sure, however -- it's tough to tell with just a brief demo.
This will likely sell quite well, so we'll see how the public's reaction goes when it ships.
