Moto GP is an accurate simulation of championship motorcycle racing for the Wii and was developed by Capcom. The game comes with the standard fare of options found in racing games such as a career mode, time trials, and multi-player races. While the game is simple to navigate with its presentation, from the initial start up of the game, I had one major beef to grind with it.
The first time you power up this game on your Wii, the game will ask if you want to go to the tutorial mode. “This is good,” I thought to myself, as I had never really played a realistic motorcycle racing game before. My only prior experiences were with Excite Bike and Stunt Trax FX, which, while fun, were in no way accurate simulations of the sport. The minute you accept the offer to try tutorial mode, you are thrown out onto the track with a bike already moving and are given no explanations of the controls whatsoever. Think about that for a second. Isn’t a tutorial supposed to be a lesson on how to do something? To give another perspective on this, think about teaching your child how to drive a car. If you went about teaching your kid to drive the way this game does, you would start the car for the boy or girl, get it moving, and then after giving no explanation of how to do anything you bail out of the car tucking and rolling as your poor offspring desperately attempts to figure out how to steer before becoming a bloody smear on the pavement. I can’t tell you how many times I attempted to stop crashing into the walls before I gave up on this so called “tutorial mode.”
After I calmed down a bit, I went to the options menu to get a grip on what the actual controls were. Now for those of you thinking this, no I didn’t look at the instruction booklet. But who can actually say they read those any more when you buy a game? At any rate, this game gives you the option of using 4 different control types. The default control set up does not use the nun chuck, which was the mistake I made, as I still had it plugged in. Control type one is most similar to Mario Kart, as you hold down A to accelerate and rotate the wiimote to actually steer. This is the simplest control and is recommended for beginners.
The second control type has you steer with the nun chuck, but rotate the wiimote like the accelerator on a bike. This mode of control is the most accurate in recreating an authentic motorcycle ride but has two problems: one, it’s not specified how far you have to rotate to get full acceleration so you just have to mess around with it to get a feel for it; second, the breaks are the A and B buttons for the front and back wheels, so when you attempt to use the breaks you will find yourself hitting the pause button (+) a few times until you get used to it. The second and third control types use the nun chuck to steer while the wiimote has different button setups for accelerating and changing gears. Overall though, the first two controller types are more fun to use once you get used to them, which should take twenty to thirty minutes for the learning curve.
Navigating the menus is simple enough as mentioned before, so starting races or setting up your bike is simple to get too. While the presentation on the pre-race screens are simple and have catchy music, the actual races themselves tend to be a little bit bland. Yes, this is supposed to be a simulation, but once the race starts, there is no music, no commentating or announcing, and no noise from the crowd watching the race at all. All you will hear is the engines of 20 some-odd bikes groaning and revving up (Which all sound exactly the same). Something to liven up the atmosphere during races would have been appreciated and would have attracted more casual gamers that are unfamiliar with the sport.
As for visual presentation, the graphics are simple, but effective. Yes, the Wii is capable of more, but for the people that will want to play this game, control is more important than looks. You can see the detail in the pavement on the tracks and the sand if you veer off course, though the night time tracks seem darker than necessary as there are no stars in the sky nor buildings in the far off background. Though, while racing, you should pay attention to the road ahead, not be sightseeing, so it’s not a huge offense to the game’s design and presentation.
