See - even Sony published titles on the PS3 can be crap, and get atrocious scores...

US, October 4, 2007 - First there was Super Rub-a-Dub, the drain-swirling rubber ducky simulator that we had guessed would likely remain the PS3's worst game throughout most, if not all, of its lifespan. Then came Championship Sprint, a shoddy port of an arcade game that managed to barely nudge out Super Rub-a-Dub for the worst game on the system. Once again, we didn't think it could get any worse. But then along came Go! Sports Ski...

Created by Yuke's Media Creations, the development house behind the wildly popular and successful SmackDown vs. RAW franchise, Go! Sports Ski is an abomination of a game. Its controls are terrible, the feature set is extremely bare-bones (even for a downloadable title) and some of the options and perks are head-scratchingly stupid.

Let's begin with the control issues. Aside from menu navigation, the game uses the Sixaxis motion controls exclusively. Movement, jumping, tricks and everything else are performed by tilting the controller, and there's no way to change this. While turning works decently, to an extent at least (it can be hard to make extreme cuts in the snow), things like tricks and even just using your poles to push yourself can be frustrating, unresponsive and aggravating. To push with your poles, you need to twist the controller left and right. This sounds simple enough, but the game will oftentimes think that you're trying to jump. And even when it does work, your dude will usually continue to push after you wish to stop, and you can't turn while pushing, so you're left out of control.

Speaking of control, there are issues with the gear that you're allowed to pick. You have three options for skis - one that turns well but is slow, one that's fast but turns like a boat, and one that's in the middle. This is a classic setup going back to the days of Ice Hockey on the NES, but it doesn't work here simply because the slow skis are too slow to be competitive and the fast skis turn so poorly that you're basically in control of a runaway train.

Tricks are done by twisting, turning and rotating the controller. Sometimes. You're allowed to do tricks off some jumps, but sometimes a giant X will appear on-screen and you won't be able to perform tricks, like if you simply ride off a giant jump rather than actually jumping. Why would this prevent you from performing a trick? To make matters worse, it can be hard to stop performing a trick, which means your dude will continue to flip around and around even though you're holding the controller perfectly straight and still, causing you to crash. Good times. And by good we mean extremely annoying.

Features-wise, you'll find a whopping two courses to race on. You can change the weather to be snowy, but all that does is put a giant wall of fog in front of you to make it harder to see. Yeah, that's really fun. The two courses aren't terrible, but navigating them can be an issue at times due to the game's poor physics model.

When going down the side of a cliff you should travel at extremely high speeds, even if said cliff is composed of rock. In Go! Sports Ski, rocks make you slow down quite a bit, even if you're traveling straight down, forcing you to sit there and wait for your dude to crawl down the side of a mountain. The same thing happens if you're going too fast and wind up skiing up the side of a hill, forcing your dude to ski sideways and very slowly down the side of the slope.

There are some very questionable elements to the online play. You can play Slalom or Time Trial "online", but all that means is that your score is uploaded at the end. Why this needs to be separate from the Practice mode is beyond(!) us. Battle Mode lets you race against up to three other skiers, and works as you'd expect. One of the questionable elements has to do with the Emblems system in the game. These work like Achievements on the Xbox 360, where competing certain conditions will net you one of 27 awards.

That's fine, except that the requirements are incredibly dumb. To earn one of them, you have to win 50 online matches in a row. Not 50 total, but in a row. Worse, there's a badge that you can earn if all four players (and no less) in the room have the 50 wins in a row Emblem, and then you win a randomly started competition.

Good times.

Closing Comments
Go! Ski Sports is terrible. That's all you need to know.

Rating	Description
out of 10	click here for ratings guide
3.0	Presentation There are a number of very questionable aspects, like the Emblems system and the barren amount of content.
4.0	Graphics The characters look okay (arguably), but the mountain can look pretty bad at times.
4.0	Sound Like the amount of content, there's not much here.
2.0	Gameplay The controls suck. There are only two mountains. The snowy weather option is stupid. And, the controls suck. They're bad enough to mention them twice.
3.0	Lasting Appeal With only two courses, this is as bare-bones as it gets.
2.1 Terrible	OVERALL (out of 10 / not an average)

 

After reading the first 2 paragraphs, I can safely say that I'm still not getting the point of this thread.

That sounds terrible... Until you compare it to BALLS OF FURY!

October 16, 2007 - Rupert Young, how could you? You're billed as the managing director of quality assurance for Balls of Fury, a Wii title based on the movie of the same name, but we wonder if you're even a real person. Surely, you must be a pseudonym. You must! Sir, when it comes to this "game," there is simply no quality to assure, and of that we assure you. Balls of Fury is, in fact, such an awful, putrid title that we would determinedly avoid it as a promotional Flash mini-game on a beer website. You want Wii owners to pay $29.99 for this ludicrously amateur and downright offensive endeavor? Why would we do that when we could sit down and enjoy the still-bad, but far superior mini-game on the official Balls of Fury website? See? $29.99 saved.

Balls of Fury for Wii, developed by Black Lantern Studios, is a ping pong game about as deep and flashy, so to speak, as the website game linked above. Players use the Wii remote, gesturing to the left or right, up or down, to hit the ball back at opponents. It's a concept that seems perfectly suited to Nintendo's controller, but the execution and the end controls have been so irreversibly botched that there's little fun to be gained. Strike that - no fun. Comedy, yes, for a very short while, but that's about it. In direct contrast to ping pong in Wii Play, which offers direct control, the mechanics in Balls of Fury are so far removed from one-to-one control that you feel like you are pre-selecting shots and not really manipulating the paddle. You can gesture to the left or right more than a second before a returned shot comes your way and your character will still paddle the ball, no problemo. Gestures are merely filling in for buttons. Worse, you can simply shake the Wii remote around like a monkey on crack and you will still successfully volley with opponents for minutes; you may even win matches.

We can keep going. There's no satisfying way to add spin or power with any sense that you have actually influenced the ball with your Wii remote. The collision detection is atrociously broken - balls will fly through character models and disappear off screen. Some special shots are merely violent screen shakes meant to confuse players, and not in a good way. The game's storyline consists of quickly cycled static images from the semi-hit movie - Wii discs store as much data as DVDs, so what gives? Character models only faintly resemble their movie counterparts and animate stiffly and robotically. The in-game environments lack any graphic finesse whatsoever. And the "witty" one-liners are cued so often that players will tire of them in minutes. Don't get us started on the game's rudimentary interface.

The only conclusion we can draw is that players who receive this game as a holiday or birthday gift should know that their parents secretly hate them. No, really, they called and told us.

Closing Comments

No. Sorry, no. Please return to sender. It's been a good while since I've come across a game of this caliber, which is to say that I don't often see titles that suck this bad in this day and age. In the early age of 3D, which Balls of Fury harkens back to, yes, but not in today's gaming industry. That is at least an accomplishment of some kind, although I doubt it will be an award that the publisher wears proudly on Balls of Fury's box. Hah – I wrote Balls of Fury's box. You see? I'm the target demographic for this game and still I think it's awful. I would tell you not to buy this game, but if you have access to the Internet, you're already smart enough to know.

They both sound terrible :) At least Ninty didn't publish Balls of Fury - that would put them in the "SHAME" catalog...

ya, IGN didn't like it ....

A 12 day old review. Shams will you post a bad review of a wii game and then go on to ridicule Nintendo?

On the Nes era I was ok with games that were developed with a budget of U$ 200. I do not mind cheap games, but charging for stuff that is inferior to the Newsgrounds flash based games is unexcusable.

This is a clear troll post by shams and its disturbing, the review is 12 days old. The game is priced at $3 and they review it like it costs $60. The game looks better then any wii title and the game is very fun. IGN just hates the PSN and its games they also reviewed the duck game very low too, which is considered by many to be one of the best games ever, it is priced at $5 and they review it like it costs $60.,

Mars said: A 12 day old review. Shams will you post a bad review of a wii game and then go on to ridicule Nintendo?

That would be a long post because their are so many Wii games with bad reviews.

stof could you please ban shams.. thanks..