The ‘Home Darts Board Center’ is available from Woolworths for £24.99 which to myself, is quite a bit of money. It does include a compact wooden cabinet with an official darts board inside, some darts and a pen and board rubber with a wipe-clean white board for scores. Now, I may be wrong in thinking this but from the offset, with a recommended retail price of £34.99 for PDC Darts Championship 2008 for the Wii, I think my money would be going to Woolworths.

The game features an all-star cast of Caucasian, male, over-weight darts players with Phil ‘The Power’ Taylor gracing the cover of the game itself. Although perhaps not the most diverse of sports, Oxygen Interactive Software could have at least popped in some up and coming talent or created their own to widen out the spectrum in terms of representations of real people in the game for bitter journalists, including myself. Their answer to forcing unrealistic characters down our throats though is the games saving grace, the character maker. With a selection of less than four different body shapes (large, fat etc) and four different body-tones (between white and slightly tanned, it’s hardly revolutionary) the game does actually let you create your own multisex and multicultural player roster with crazy hairstyles intact.

Playing darts with the Wii remote, you would imagine to be a no brainer, but when you have to remind yourself that ‘the Remote itself is shaped kind of like a dart, I suppose’, how far are we trying to justify a purchase than ignoring the obvious. Booting up the game itself we’re provided with a distinctly cheese-tastic guitar soundtrack pretty much lifted from Excite Truck and given the main menu. Tournament, Exhibition, Career, it’s all the same thing, you select a character, sometimes even the location, and thrust into the lives of a pro darts player.

As you aim at the board with the remote, you can’t help but feel the pains of a clogged up artery, that must be Oxygen’s explanation for why it’s so difficult to actually throw the thing. The game does give some simple pointers ‘Press a, throw smoothly and let go’ but these don’t really help at all, most of the time (if you can actually throw the dart) you end up veering off half way across the board when your opponent is getting 180 points in the first round – not a good start. This might not be a bad thing however, the game does splatter the abbreviation ‘PDC’ all over it (which stands for the ‘professional darts corporation’) perhaps Oxygen have made a game for professional darts players rather than the casual gaming audience we’ve come to expect in retail for the Wii? In this case, they’re really cutting out quite a sizeable chunk of players who will find this game incredibly difficult to play in comparison to a honest real dart game.

Graphically, PDC World Championship Darts 2008 gets me all nostalgic inside and reminds me of an older Playstation 1 title in terms of backgrounds. Although the players themselves are well modelled and do look quite similar to their real life counterparts, the locations in the game usually consist of empty rooms, lifeless bystanders and terribly textured surfaces. This is the sort of thing that I just can’t stand these days just like racing games which still use badly rendered textures for crowds (although we may drive fast the majority of the time, what’s stopping me wanting to get to know my loving crowd better huh?). Funnily enough the actual stuff that matters in the game does look nice, but when we are given crowd shots with so little enthusiasm, it’s hard to differ in attitude.

Famous for their celebrity cash ins (Cheggers himself was immortalised on the Wii several months ago by Oxygen), the developers have not done an awful job converting darts to the Wii. The fact that pretty much every big name in darts is there, coupled with the official darts license does seem like this is probably the best game for the sport out there. It also has some nice graphic art in the print as well, but that doesn’t stop it from playing awfully and just being hugely frustrating to pick up. That darts set from Woolies isn’t looking so bad after all…

4/10