Preview by: Brandon “Master Controls” Cackowski-Schnell

While most of the Wii sport game dollars get thrown Nintendo's way, Hudson has been patiently churning our games in its Deca Sports line since the game debuted two years ago and making its own mark in the process. The premise throughout all of the iterations has been the same: provide ten sports to play while giving the player the ability to assemble their own team of small, medium and large players, each size conferring different advantages for each sport. Deca Sports 3 brings the same team customization and ten more sports along with the addition of an extra set of controls for the Wii Motion Plus set.

With the addition of Wii Motion Plus, players have the option of choosing to play each sport with either casual controls or master controls. The Wii Motion Plus is required for master controls, however I wasn't able to tell readily if casual controls would take advantage of the finer control of Motion Plus should it be attached to the Wiimote. What is obvious is that master controls aren't just more responsive but make the individual sports more difficult adding an extra level of challenge onto the proceedings.

I was able to play a demo of the game that included air racing , raquetball, volleyball and lacrosse. The final version will have all of these sports as well as springboard diving, giant slalom, kayak slalom, log cutting, halfpipe and fencing. In addition, fencing, volleyball, lacrosse and racquetball will have online play however I was not able to try out this functionality.

Air racing is a timed race in which you pilot a small plane through a series of gates. Hitting or missing the gates will cause time to be added to your score, as will traveling through a gate in a position other than what the gate dictates, be it level or turned to one side or the other. On the flip side, traveling through a gate the proper way shaves time off of your final score. Acceleration is handled by pressing the A button while all turning and banking is handled by turning the Wiimote. For this event I enabled Wii Motion Plus and just like the plane flying event in Wii Sport Resort the plane handled well and reacted appropriately to the Wiimote's movements. I can also say that mastering a race is much harder than simply tooling around a lake and I placed dead last among my Deca Sports brethren. Boo Team Binky, boo!

Next up was volleyball, also played with master controls. In this game you move the Wiimote down to serve and then wait until the red circle on the screen closes on the ball itself. Once that happens, a swing of the Wiimote serves the ball, hopefully to one of the opposing team members. Pressing up or down on the d-pad prior to serving allows you to change to an underhand or jump serve. Once the ball is in play, you bump up the Wiimote to set the ball and use the same red circle to gauge when to hit the ball back across the net. After the initial bump you can use the d-pad to put the rest of your players into different formations as well as use the direction pointing of the Wiimote to direct where you spike the ball. It took me a few serves to get the hang of what was going on but once I got into it, I quite enjoyed myself. The game moves a little too quickly for me to tell that the formations I was choosing helped or hindered but at the same time, I didn't feel overloaded with information. Team Binky unfortunately lost this one too, although by the slimmest of margins. Double boo!

Next up was racquetball. Again you bump the Wiimote down to bounce the ball and then swing to hit the ball for your serve. Racquetball is one area where switching from master controls to casual controls not only takes away some finer control but also makes the game easier. With master controls enabled you use the c-stick to guide your character to the ball. With casual controls the computer takes over player movement. I'm not going to lie, I got blanked in my first game with master controls enabled and had zero success moving my character to where they could make a play on the ball. Once I switched to casual controls things got a little better however I still had a hard time angling my shots to be anything other than soft lobs that then got knocked back down my throat. The same circle and ball mechanic is in place here, giving feedback as to when to hit but even with this, I felt that getting any precision on my shots was next to impossible. That's what I get for trying to be casual I guess. In the end, Team Binky fell, yet again. Triple boo!