The last time I went on vacation, I drove a little ways to the ocean to enjoy the beach and all that Mother Nature had to offer. It was relaxing and just what I needed. The same cannot be said for the majority of my vacations from years past. Most involved a lot of activities, walking and trying to get to each place as quickly as possible. It was frantic and I never really had to chance to enjoy it until had a chance to sit back and browse through all the pictures we took. So when I played “Go Vacation” for the Wii, I hoped I could get a good break from the mediocre games I’ve played of late, relax but also have fun. After all, Go Vacation offers “over 50 types of activities” and “over 100 ways to play”. It is compatible with the Wii Motion Plus and the Wii Balance Board. The game is also rated “E” for everyone 10+ and is presented with cute characters and is kid friendly. Go Vacation on the surface seemed to have a lot of good things going for it. Unfortunately, by the end of it, it achieved what has yet to happen in my real vacations: boredom, tediousness and making fun simple things overly complicated.
Go Vacation has you playing 1 of 4 resorts including a marine resort, a city resort, a winter resort and a mountain resort along with corresponding activities. In the regular mode of play, you travel through each large resort using various modes of transport such as walking, skiing and swimming until you encounter the activity you must complete in order to receive a stamp and move on to the next activity or resort. As you complete each activity, the other resorts become unlocked as well as faster modes of transportation.
Needles to say, when I go on vacation, I do not like to feel limited in which activities I can or cannot do, or for that matter, in what order to do them. I therefore immediately did not like this whole “complete this activity before moving on” business. You can go out of order and complete an activity that you are not directed to do; however, the game punishes you by not rewarding you with a stamp and you do not make any progress towards unlocking the next resort.
What made this worse was the travelling between these activities as it was rather cumbersome, time consuming and occasionally frustrating. I just wanted to immediately play the next activity and not have to try to skate or ski around this huge map, especially if the mode of transportation at the time was slow. While I am sure that the developer’s intent was for the player to somewhat enjoy the freedom of roaming, it wasn’t fun enough and just ended up unnecessarily adding a delay in getting to the next location.
When you finally reached the activity marked on your map, this was where the fun was supposed to begin. However, for many of these activities, this is not the case. Firstly, I found the controls for many of these games unnecessarily complicated in that they could have focused on simplicity rather than attempt to emulate “real life.” I say unnecessarily as the controls weren’t hard to figure out but could be simplified. For example, depending on the game, there would be buttons to press from both the nunchuk and the Wii-mote when one would have easily sufficed. It takes some ingenuity to make something relatively complicated and making it simple and accessible while still achieving the same results (i.e. fun). That didn’t happen here.
Even if the control issues were simplified, the games themselves weren’t that much fun anyway. I didn’t get much of a sense I was competing with the AI or even against my friends. To top it off, the activities were sometimes too long to complete (such as achieving a certain number of points needed to win or the length of time in a match.) There just wasn’t a sense of anticipation of wanting to play the next level as it just seemed to disappoint you again and again. You did, however, keep playing for a little longer than you expected as the activities sounded like they were interesting and you wanted to see for yourself.
After playing it on single player, I hoped the game would be more fun by playing in multiplayer mode but it wasn’t much better. There wasn’t that level of either the frantic play or skilful duels often seen in good multiplayer “party style” games. I usually have the most fun with games where you can have almost anyone come over to your house and pick up and play while still having room for technique for the more experienced player. In Go Vacation, there wasn’t a lot of room for skill development as it seemed almost scripted in how you achieve victory (do a certain move over and over the right way and you’ll get there).
The sound for Go Vacation is a combination of instrumentals and some cheesy Japanese inspired pop music. I caught some particularly eye rolling parts in the chorus where it goes something like, “Yes, you can do it! Take a chance on me!” The rest of the music is subtler and is virtually indiscernible between each level. The sound effects are a little better but could have been more satisfying in some ways especially in the more action oriented games. Then again, it’s not like as if a lot is going on when you play and therefore the sound can only be considered as appropriate but not mind-blowing.
One of the better aspects of the game is the graphics. The environments in the resorts look reasonably good especially in the marine resort. In single player mode, the picture is relatively smooth with only some minor rough edges. However, as you play in multi-player split screen mode and travel around the resort, the graphics occasionally slow down and become more jagged which was a little annoying.
The Miis or avatars you can use are cute but I prefer to use my Mii as it gives me some familiarity and added cuteness (after all, I made him!) and I enjoyed the expressions he made in victory and defeat. The avatars are just a little more detailed than your Mii but are still fairly simple. There also isn’t much depth or detail in the environments in regards to shadowing but at least it keeps it relatively smooth. The activities or mini-games have good colour and provides a good sense of what’s going on. I think overall the developers did a decent job graphics wise.
Much like a travel brochure that promises a fantastic vacation that is anything but, Namco Bandai’s “Go Vacation” for the Wii is one of those vacations you wish you had avoided. Sure there are activities a plenty but the execution of such fails to generate any real sense of accomplishment or joy. You can travel around a good-looking resort and do whatever you want but will probably end up taking a little longer to get where you have to go. You can bring your friends along for the ride but do not expect to have a lot of fun with them. In fact, it’s probably best you cancel this vacation and make plans to go somewhere else.
