Go game for Wii
A few days ago we already talked about The Path of Go for the Xbox console, now it’s time to talk about go games for the wii console. For some reason, it seems that previous generations of consoles had a bunch of go games available: from game boy to playstation 2, there are dozens of them, with better or worse graphics and AI strength. But, unfortunately, there aren’t many Go games for the last generation of consoles: wii, xbox 360 and playstation 3.
D3Publisher released a collection of games called “The table game”, as the first volume of the Simple 2000 series. This volume includes 11 games electable from the menu below these lines:
Vertically, from left to right: shogi, go, Othello (aka reversi), gomoku, mahjong, unknown flower-cards game, unknown flower-cards game 2, something similar to bridge, sevens (aka Fan Tan), memory and solitaire – Klondike style. Once you enter the Go section you’re prompted with the next screen where you can choose the board size, handicap, time settings, and a few other fields which I still haven’t managed to decipher. As fas I have explored, I still couldn’t find an online mode or a 2 player mode… but this may require further investigation.
If there is anyone able to read Japanese, please let me know the meaning of the options, specially the ones below, since I suspect they are quite relevant.
When it comes to the AI strenght, I can’t really rate it better than a 10k, I think it falls somewhere between 10k and 15k, but, obvious as it may seem this bot is very bot-ish: Some important moves which a human would never allow you to do are ignored by this bot, thus losing entire groups or losing the chance to kill groups. Sincerely, the artificial intelligence of this bot is way below what we are used to on computers: Mogobot and Gnugo are much stronger. The life and death status of the groups are very hard to establish for this bot, so he usually tries to survive till you place the final killing stone, waiting for you to make a nonsense move. On the picture below, you’ll see there are two white groups which weren’t given up till I had placed the final killing stone; in fact, white still tried to make the left group live… which only ended up in giving me some extra points. The bot isn’t actually reading the sequence where it dies. On the other hand, the life and death status of groups in the scoring phase has always been perfect.
The musical section, while being too short, is just adequate and calm enough to allow you to focus on the game while creating some sort of oriental atmosphere. The Wii controller must be held horizontally, placing the stones with button 2 and pressing A for the pause menu. By the way, the first option of the “pause” menu is to “pass”, the second one is “undo last move”, the third is “resign” and the last one is to resume the game. Guess I saved you a bunch of minutes with this.
As for the other games, I can’t really tell you its strength or options, since I lack enough knowledge of them to be trustworthy. I’ve only played a game of shogi against the AI and he defeated me so badly I had to play a few Go games more… guess I’ll have to know more shogi other than just the rules.
Update: this game is available through Amazon.co.jp and through other media, please don’t ask me how to download it, try google.
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