In ye olde Wii launch days, one of the few things that really show🌱ed off how well the remote and Nunchuk could work together was Twilight Princess’ fishing minigame. It was awesome – a great display of control finesse. Cocoto Fishing Master, a port of an old PS2 title, takes similar-ish controls and aims to strap them on to a more fully featured game. That should be a recipe for success, right? Unfortunately not. Cocoto Fishing Master’s got some nice touches, but the most fundamental thing about the game is wrong – those controls j꧒ust don’t feel right.

There are various problems: holding and releasing the A button while making the casting motion is bearable if annoying, but that’s nothing next to the delicate upward motion required to actually ‘hook’ a fish. Given that the game explicitly tells you to ‘strike’ while sꦇhowi꧂ng a remote with an arrow pointing upwards, you’ll spend the first hour or so in sore-armed frustration, failing to catch anything because the game doesn’t come with even a basic tutorial.

When you do figure it out, the first few levels of fishi🌟ng become pleasant enough, if undemanding. Later stages require some ridiculously sensitive hooking, however, and the ponderous movement of your boat over the water is teeth-gritting. Cocoto’s a nicely designed game visually, at least, and the characters have a little bit of charm to them, but it doesn’t play as well as a minigame that launched with the Wii well over a year ago. It’s best thrown back in the water. Cocoto can bore you into thinking you’re having a good time, but it’s a poorly executed game that’s been done much better before elsewhere.

Jul 21, 2008