Rapala Tournament Fishing

Ugh. In an attempt to mix it up a bit, I've decided to start attacking some of the shittier parts of my enormous video game backlog. Thus, today I started (and finished) playing this crappy little fishing simulation. My sisters and I bought it for my dad for his birthday three years ago, and I think we did so half in jest. At least then the Wii was new and the idea of being able to use a controller to simulate a fishing rod was interesting. Here in 2010, nothing about this game appealed to me at all. Let me recap. The game has no story line to speak of, and that's fine, but it leaves "beating" a game in the eye of the gamer. There are several challenges in the game, but I wasn't looking to do them all. Merely beating one was more than enough for me. Fellow logger Sweeney even said that I could probably consider the game beaten once I caught a fish I liked. And I'm doing exactly that. You pilot a boat around some body of water in any given level and all the while this guy (your assistant?) is telling you to slow down or you'll scare all the fish away. Once you find a spot where you'd like to fish (and the game in no way indicates what such "good spots" are), you can leave boat mode and enter fishing mode. This consists of casting off with the Wii remote and then reeling back in with the nunchuck. The problem is that the game is all too much like real fishing, and bites are few and far between. Why make a game like this? Seriously, in what way does casting repeatedly and reeling back in appeal to anyone? In real fishing, at least you can enjoy the fine day, the weather, and the friendly conversation while waiting for bites. But starting at a hook on your TV screen for minutes on end is damn near infuriating. Also annoying was the lack of pace with which you could reel your lure back in. Casts varied between thirty and eighty feet, but it took two or three shakes of my left hand for every foot I wanted to reel the rod in. Now, on the rare occasions that you actually do catch a fish, things get a little exciting. A line tension meter pops up and you have to be careful not to reel in too fast (as if that were possible) at the risk of breaking the line. You'll also be told by your helper guy to turn the rod left or right on occasion. Finally, when the fish is next to the boat, you're suddenly placed in the midst of a "landing" minigame in which you must line up the Wii remote with a moving fish icon then press a combination of buttons. This caught me totally off guard the first time it happened and my fish got away. The second time, I pressed the buttons all at the same time since there was really no indication of what to do, and that fish got away too. But the third time was the charm, and finally, fifteen minutes into the game, I caught my first fish. I played around a little more after that, piloting the boat around aimlessly while my assistant yelled at me to slow down, fishing with different lures, and using different amounts of drag. Ultimately though, there was nothing more to the game than that which I had already experienced. What wasn't boring was frustrating, and nothing was enjoyable; this easily may have been the worst game I've ever played on a console. I feel like we owe my dad another birthday present.