Aliens invade Wii

Although the Nintendo Wii has played host to some of the most innovative and family-friendly titles released for the current generation of consoles, hard-hitting fare aimed at squarely hardcore gamers has been a little thin on the ground.

True, there have been a couple of controversial titles, such as Manhunt, which proved a slightly odd fit for the Wii, and also a number of war-based first-person shooters, namely Call of Duty and Brothers in Arms. All of these were very welcome. However, when it comes to a proper, full-on, sci-fi based shooter with comprehensive multi-player options, Wii owners have been left wanting.

High Voltage shooting

Happily, the release of The Conduit changes all that. Developed by High Voltage Software and published by Sega, this might just be the title which persuades the hardcore contingent that the Wii truly does offer something for everyone.

When it comes to Wii titles, The Conduit is unique as, rather than just being a port of a multi-platform franchise, it was designed specifically for the console from the ground up. In effect it's a totally original game, with its own storyline and, crucially, running a graphics engine that's been developed to make the very most of the Wii's hardware. But does that make it any good? Well, yes, it does.

Invasion imminent

The Conduit sees the Earth under threat from a possible alien invasion and Special Agent Ford recruited to take them on by a mysterious organisation named The Trust.

If the story is a little unoriginal, the developers have covered this with top-class presentation. The game looks amazing and features many intriguing plot twists. There are also some great cut scenes, professionally-voiced by stars from such TV series as Hercules and Battlestar Galactica.

Cool control system

The Conduit plays extremely well, as High Voltage has managed to finally crack the problem of running a fully-featured first-person shooter on the Wii Remote by providing highly customisable control settings. Almost every control aspect is adjustable to your liking, which is just as well because you're going to find yourself in a lot of sticky situations.

Through the game's nine levels you'll encounter enemy forces, aliens, a scattering of simple navigational puzzles and, most importantly, will get to use a range of human and alien weaponry, which is always a good giggle.

Blast a friend

The single player mode is, in truth, a little short, but the online, multi-player options more than makes up for it. There are many interesting maps, approaching 20 weapons and an enjoyable selection of deathmatch and team-play play modes on offer, including the interesting Bounty Hunter, which obliges you to hunt down a specific target. The multi-player option can handle up to 12 gamers and, what's more, also allows you to also engage in live conversations using Wii Speak.

The Conduit is a breath of fresh air for Wii owners, and makes an effective case for other developers to start producing such titles for Nintendo's versatile box.

GAME's Verdict

• Designed for Wii
• Good looks
• Atmospheric cut scenes
• Excellent controls
• Excellent multi-player mode

• The short story mode

Review by: Simon 'Alien DNA' Kirrane
Version Tested: Wii
Review Published: 02.07.09

Can-do-it?

When Nintendo's Wii was first released there were two gaming genres people thought it could potentially revolutionise. One was sports games – particularly tennis, golf, cricket... anything where the Wii Remote could mimic a real sporting object. The other was First-Person Shooters – but after some wayward attempts, only Metroid Prime 3 has come close to accurate point-n-shoot gameplay. And that's more of an adventure than a Halo-style ‘proper' FPS.

Wiicore

Any hopes of a motion-sensing FPS Wii revolution are now carried, almost single-handedly, by High Voltage's Software's latest effort The Conduit. Could this catapult the Remote and Nunchuk to the forefront of shooter gameplay? And just as importantly, might The Conduit give the party-game-swamped-console a real hardcore, gamer's game to shout about? I headed to Sega HQ to investigate.

Coming to The Conduit from a regular diet of next-gen FPS's (most recently Riddick), the most obvious point of contention is its looks. Wii simply doesn't have the power to compete graphically with HD systems, and anyone expecting top-end visual bombast will be disappointed by The Conduit's jagged edges and washed out colour palette. By Wii standards, however, The Conduit is an impressive looking game, with atmospheric lighting, lots of texture detail and pretty smooth framerate, no matter how much is happening on-screen.

And it's certainly frenetic in multiplayer, which is where my hands-on with The Conduit began. The good news is that The Conduit has that pick-up-and-play feeling that the Wii is famous for, and it wasn't long before I was walking with the Nunchuk stick, aiming by tilting the Remote, jumping with A and firing with the B trigger.

The best bit though is that turning also felt natural. Unlike Wii launch FPS Red Steel, which allowed you to move the targeting reticule right across the screen and only turned your character when it hit the very edge (making it feel like you were waving a disembodied arm around) The Conduit responds to slight movements of the Wiimote to move the reticule within the middle portion of the screen, and noticeably larger movements to turn your head. It means that The Conduit controls like a twin analogue stick FPS, with more finely tuned manual aiming and overall quicker movement.

Control freak

With the basics down, I encountered my first problems with the more in-depth controls. Melee attacks are activated with a forward thrust of the Wii Remote – but because the Wiimote also moves the character's head, there were instances where it didn't register the thrust, and I'd just end up looking at the floor, dying frustratingly in the midst of a multiplayer skirmish.

That said, flicking the Nunchuk to throw grenades worked intuitively, as did quick-turning with up on the d-pad (though this was hard to reach), sniping with down (which felt VERY sensitive), swapping weapons with left and right, and crouching by holding C on the Nunchuk. Interestingly, The Conduit also has the option to lock on to foes with the Z button, which somewhat negates the Wiimote's more precise aiming, but should enable casual players to get their head around the controls – which can always be fully customised if you still can't click with them.

Controls aside, how does the whole experience feel to play? Well, a few people at the press event mention the hallowed Goldeneye, but for me it felt more like that game's N64 follow-up, Perfect Dark. The Conduit's whole shtick is that Earth has been invaded by an alien race called The Drudge, and the two weapons sets – human projectile/explosive firearms and alien beam weaponry – plus The Conduit's tendency to mix settings like sewers, city streets and sterile labs with lots of glowing neon lights and futuristic tech was decidedly reminiscent of Joanna Dark's escapades.

One thing The conduit does do uniquely is its multiplayer voting system. Again, the weapon types and the feel of the levels – lots of smallish maps and enclosed spaces – is PD-esque, but every person playing gets to choose a level, gametype and weapon set, and the most popular wins. There's standard free-for-all and team deathmatch modes in there, and also one called the All Seeing Eye, in which the person who holds on to the A.S.E. (which looks like a metallic Magic 8 Ball) the longest wins the match, like Halo 3's Oddball.

Wiivolution?

The A.S.E. also made an appearance in my brief two-level bash at the story campaign, which saw me taking control of rookie agent Michael Ford and battling robots, aliens and brainwashed human agents in underground tunnels and at an airport. It was action-packed and enjoyable, if somewhat linear – although using the A.S.E to find hidden alien nodes and open doors did add some variety.

Can the Conduit revolutionise FPS gaming? In all honesty it's unlikely – but the chances are that it will bring robust story-driven and online multiplayer action to a console crying out for exactly that. Watch this space...

Preview by: Mark 'All Seeing Eye' Scott
Preview Published: 08.05.09

GAME chats with two of the guys behind the Wii's next big thing...

The Conduit is the Wii's latest attempt to make motion sensing the new way to play First-Person Shooters – and Sega's latest effort to bring hardcore gaming to the casual Wii audience. To find out more about it, we sat down with two of the head guys from Conduit developers High Voltage Software; Creative chief Eric Nofsinger and CEO Kerry Ganofsky.

Can you start by telling us a bit about The Conduit? Give us the intro.

Eric: What we're attempting to make is the definitive First-Person Shooter for Wii.

In a nutshell the story is that you play as Michael Ford, a secret agent inducted into a shadowy organisation known as The Trust – sort of our Illuminati type group. You're sent into what appears to be a terrorist attack, but quickly reveals itself to be a full-scale alien invasion, and conspiracy and mayhem ensue!

Did you have a story to tell, or a game you wanted to make, or both?

Eric: We mostly wanted to make a game that was of very high quality for the Wii. It was an option for us to create something original from scratch and we wanted to take advantage of everything the Wii could do. Everything then came together in tandem – the setting; the story; the gameplay. It's all come together very nicely.

Kerry: Accessibility was important. Being able to not only attract core gamers. Nintendo users are very passionate and they remember games like Perfect Dark and Goldeneye. But we also wanted to introduce the FPS to a wider audience; reach out to the 50 million-plus users of the Nintendo Wii worldwide and show that there IS quality software out there for the system.

Why a hardcore game on the Wii – do you think there's a market for it?

Eric: Absolutely! There's a sad misnomer that Wii owners don't want this kind of thing. However, there really hasn't been any of this kind of thing. The majority of core games tend to be more mature-oriented boutique games; niche games.

Core is all about variety, depth of gameplay, replayability, customisation – really listening to what the core gamer expects. Accessibility is what the mainstream wants. I don't think those are necessarily at odds in the First-Person Shooter genre. Games like Halo have proven you can satisfy a couple of different groups. I think The Conduit does an admirable job of balancing the two.

Kerry: I think party games are considered the dominant titles on the Wii because no-one's really stepped up and done something like this exclusively for the Wii. There's a big market out there for The Conduit. Sega and High Voltage have done their jobs, now truly it's the consumer that can actually change the entire landscape of Wii software. Not just for High Voltage and Sega, but also for the Wii community.

Eric: Many publishers are looking at how The Conduit is going to do to see if they should invest in hardcore games on the Wii. If you want another party game, or another game with ‘sports' or ‘fit' in the name, don't buy The Conduit. If you want something that's high quality where people are trying to push the graphical and technical capabilities, and just the fun aspect, then The Conduit is your game.

The Conduit's control system is obviously unique – not many games have tried it on Wii. How does it work?

Eric: Our control input is a simple point-and-shoot interface where you use the Wiimote to aim and fire, and you also do a quick jab to do melee attacks. Your Nunchuk directional stick moves you around, and you do a quick toss with the Nunchuk to throw a grenade.

That's our basic controls, but the important part is The Conduit's controls are all highly customisable. Core players can remap their controls, change the bounding box, cursor sensitivity, turning speed, modify their HUD (Heads-Up Display) elements. All of these things are enumerated, so Conduit players can share them with their friends. Controls are saved to your profile and copy back and forth between singleplayer and multiplayer.

That goes neatly into my next question! The Conduit's Multiplayer – can you tell us a bit about that?

Eric: We've got a very robust multiplayer and singleplayer in The Conduit. We've 13 multiplayer modes which is a nice variety. We've hit the standards of Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch and Capture The Flag, and a lot of variants and obscure oddities, and hopefully new Conduit-specific favourites.

In The Conduit's singleplayer there's nine missions, and there's a lot of content to unlock; an achievements system as well as a ranking system, which is used in multiplayer. That's used for matchmaking, so you can play with players of a similar level. We've given a lot of thought to making The Conduit as inclusive but also challenging and rewarding to as many players as possible.

Which other FPS games do you guys play and admire?

Eric: Oh gosh, where do you start!

Kerry: There's so many bodies of work that you could draw from. Whenever anyone compares The Conduit to Perfect Dark or Goldeneye, it's flattering to be compared to such wonderful works of art in our industry. I enjoy Halo, the entire Call of Duty series...

Eric: Medal of Honor; Left 4 Dead; Resistance; Gears of War… there's SO many great First-Person Shooters out there. Sadly, none residing on the Wii. So we're hoping to be the first there.

There's been 12 First-Person Shooters on the Wii, six of which are World War II themed, the majority of those 12 are ports, only two of which have received any rankings above 80% - one of which is Metroid, which is frikkin' amazing, but it's also an adventure game and is lumped in with FPS's because of it's perspective. Not so much that it has online multiplayer and the other things that FPS fans expect. The other is Call of Duty: World at War, which is a respectable game, but a port from PSP which doesn't take advantage of the technical and graphical capabilities of Wii like The Conduit does.

Talking of technical capabilities... will we see The Conduit ported across to the other systems with graphical enhancements?

Eric: Not a chance. We have no interest in doing that with The Conduit – this is a game that was made for this system and this control interface. Graphics are one component of a First-Person Shooter and they're very important to fans – hardware sales of graphics cards and computers over the years certainly point to the importance of graphical fidelity.

However, gameplay is really why we opted to make The Conduit on the Wii. We believe the controller interface we have in The Conduit could do for Wii what Halo did for Xbox, in that it pulled people over to a new way of playing First-Person shooters. Before that, people thought PC with mouse and keyboard was THE way to play First-Person shooters. Now you have many people who prefer dual analogue sticks. We're hoping to pull in a new breed of First-Person Shooter fans.

We've seen first-hand at tradeshows and community events where people who have never played an FPS on any console pick up the controller and in the first few minutes feel like they're accomplishing something – that's before Kerry and I come in and blow their heads off, anyway!

Kerry: [laughs]

Eric: Seriously though, giving players the chance to accessibly interface with First-Person Shooters for the first time – I think that will be healthy for the shooter community at large. We hope The Conduit is the game that can spark that. We hope to have many imitators after us.

Kerry: Having said that, having that shallow difficulty curve of a robust control system and that physicality of aiming, melee thrusting and throwing grenades – from a gameplay perspective that's outstanding for the hardcore. We're hoping The Conduit will define the next step for First-Person Shooters on Wii.

Do you also see The Wii and a game like The Conduit as educating people as to what games are really about – not just being a toy, but being serious entertainment?

Eric: I think the Wii's an interesting beast, and we're really proud to have made The Conduit for it. I think there is a perception that the console is a toy, primarily because of the products available for it, but I think it can be more than that; a truly immersive, entertainment device that can reach out to people in a different way. I hope we play a small part in that – and I think we can with The Conduit.

There's space for both things, and certainly for higher quality products on the Wii. Whether they're casual games or full-blown First-Person Shooters, there's definitely room for improvement – and if nothing else, I hope people support the Conduit so that they'll see more games done to a high quality standard. Whether it's shooters or brawlers or platformers, the Wii is capable of a lot more than developers and publishers are doing right now.

Couldn't agree more. Cheers guys.

Interview by: Mark Scott
Interview Published: 14.05.09