Motion Sickness
I have ended this project indefinitely. I am going to have the videos public again, but I just wanted to say that I have changed a lot as a person since I was doing this project. I think I was being incredibly childish and wasting a lot of my time with this whole thing. While I am glad I could entertain people with my gameplay, I regret a lot of the frustration I voiced on stream, and I regret having spent so much time on the project instead of doing more important things with my time. I hope someone is able to get something out of these videos.
Goal for this game is to get 1st place in all Pro League Tournaments, as well as maintain the 250 average required to stay in Pro League. (After you beat Pro League with the 250 average requirement, the game just lets you play Pro League as many times as you like. There are no new tournaments after beating Pro League once, they just loop endlessly.)
First of all, my apologies for the long wait for the next game, this one just took a while LOL, like literally 120 hours. There are several things that made it take a while, but I'll give a short summary.
The game has you create a character that has a set of stats, which of course aren't very good when you start out, but this makes it so you are more likely to throw worse throws (even if you know how to play well), just completely randomly, and throwing bad throws seems to maybe be a random mechanic itself. The game also has no tutorials or anything helpful in the manual to teach you how to actually bowl well, INCLUDING hooking, which is huge. I literally still don't quite understand exactly how hooking works, but I'm pretty sure that it's fairly touchy and easy to mess up.
This game also has various oil patterns on the alley, although this is really mostly prominent in Pro League, with there being about 10 different new oil patterns you need to bowl on, although the strat I used for most of the game seemed to work fairly well as long as I tried and reset enough. Overall it just felt like sometimes I just needed to inch a little to the side and keep doing that until I got consistent enough strikes to win whatever matches I was on.
The game also has about 69 matches for each of the first 3 leagues (Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced.) With the averages to advance from these leagues being decently high for your average bowler. Beginner league requires an average of 179 per game for the whole season, which can be difficult with bad stats and learning how to play the game. Intermediate bumps the average up to 209, which honestly isn't that bad of a jump from 179 and wasn't terribly difficult for me once I could bowl that well. Advanced league though? Oh boy lol. To beat Advanced League, you need to keep an average of 249 per game for the whole season. This is basically like 9/12 strikes at least for every game (on average). This was extremely tedious lol. Once you get through that, you get to Pro League, which thankfully only bumps up the average to 250. (Why not just have advanced at like, 239 or something slightly less tedious?) Overall the only big difference in difficulty here was the all new pro oil patterns, which definitely took me a little bit of time to get used to. Pro league also is completely just tournaments instead of league nights and tournaments. There are 18 tournaments in total. This means that there are 90 games in Pro League that you need to keep an average of 250 for. Over HALF of career mode you need to bowl over 249, which is pretty tough, and again, kinda tedious feeling.
Overall this game would probably take like 8 hours to speedrun if you played perfectly the whole time and forfeited some matches to save time. Which would still require probably around 150 or so perfect games hahaha. Would love to see a TAS of this some day.
But yeah, uh, this game is okay? Like the averages in Advanced League and Pro League get to be really tedious, but once you learn how to play this game, it's not all that bad. The thing is, this really isn't the type of game a lot of people can just pick up and play in an afternoon and do very well at all, I feel. It takes a good bit of time to get used to bowling well, and I feel like if the game included a tutorial of some sort, it would have been MILES better. This just kinda feels like a sorta shoddy port. It was fun getting some cool shots, but when the AI bowls like crap 99% of the time, and the average I have to keep is so high, it's kinda tedious. A great challenge though. Without abusing saves I think it would be a heck of an accomplishment to beat Pro League and keep a 250 average without getting screwed over in some way. TBH i'd just say stick to Wii Sports Bowling, but if you really like bowling games and you love a long challenging game, I could maybe recommend it. If you don't care about score or progression at all, it's not bad, really.