Wii Sports

There is a lot of novelty involved with this game. I found tennis and baseball to be the most enduring, and only dipped into the other sports occasionally.

I think my story with this game is significant enough to review, as this is one of the first memories I have with playing and falling in love with a video game, at a young age at least. I, like many others, got this in the little sleeve it came in with the Wii itself, and my family and I would spend almost every day playing the five categories of sports included. Unfortunately, I had lost that original disc at some point several years later, and in a spur of nostalgia, I had decided last Christmas that I needed the game back in my collection. So I found a used copy, bought it, and had to come to grips with the fact while I still think of this game very fondly, maybe Wii Sports isn't as perfect as I once had thought.

However, I will start with the positives, because I ultimately have more of those: the game's simplistic appeal is pulled off very well, and to this day, when the Wii has been left multiple console generations in the past, it's still a major pull, even for just five sports.

Tennis is really addicting. Each side is comprised of two players, which is great for a four player experience, but it also provides an extra challenge for a two player match, where you're in control of both Miis and can decide if you want to line up a shot from the backside of the court, or right up against the net. And depending on how the opposite player competes, this can really matter in the end for success, especially when going solo and working up through the ranks of the computer players (something I'll expand on in more detail later).

Bowling has also been a favorite of mine since as young as I can remember. Lining up the perfect shot and angling it just right for a strike is made so satisfying that it just screams replayability, but it's even more impressive when trying to pick up a spare from a split pair of pins. There's a lot of open ended quality to this one (can't forget to mention throwing the bowling ball backwards and frightening the captive crowd of Mii characters), but that can also be a downside to the game, as the well can run fairly dry if you're just playing this one by yourself. It's definitely a game that lends better to the multiplayer aspect, as there is no CPU rank to pit yourself up against.

Golf is a mixed bag. On one hand, the course design is well thought out and intricate, and it's well worth doing the full nine hole stretch. The amount of versatility you're given with lining up shots and the power of your swing is also done fairly, but beyond that, this game can also lose its charm pretty quickly. I think for golf in particular, along with the other sports, an unlockables system might've been a nice incentive to have for coming back. Maybe for golf, it could've been different golf clubs that you unlock. Or for bowling, maybe a different alleyway or extra spin techniques even.

The closest we get to that level of variety in the game is the training section, which is a subset of three mini games per each sport included. And most of these really aren't all that necessary. The only ones I find myself coming back to are the bowling power throws, which has you bowling a ten lane game with increasing amounts of pins, all the way up to 91, and the Golf target practice, which has a surprisingly solid amount of challenge. But aside from that, a lot of it is just really boring and mundane practice routines. Stuff like parrying tennis balls, hitting home runs, and boxing dojo routines.

Before I wrap up the positives, I of course have to give special mention to the sound design and music, because if anything, it's the crown jewel of this whole game. A lot of the satisfaction in sports like tennis and golf is due to the enthusiasm of the announcer and the sound of each hit and crowd noise. These are sounds that still play in my head to this day because of how memorable they are. And the music is genuinely great, whether that be the regular title theme, the subdued menu music, the smooth as hell guitar tune that plays during bowling games, or the little jingle that plays at the end of boxing.

But as for the negatives, I haven't mentioned two of these sports, because they have aged like milk in my opinion, those being baseball and boxing. Baseball is very one note, and a lot of times, I find myself beating the other team after the first inning due to mercy rule. It's extremely easy to get home runs and doubles and triples, all because the field teams move so slow and don't have any patterns as to how they operate. Sometimes they're right under the ball ready to catch a pop fly, and other times they're completely off to the side, and this would all be fine if there were any sense of control, but you only get to play as the pitcher and the batter. And pitching is also so deprived of anything fun. You just chop the Wii remote down several times and that's all the gameplay there is, other than pressing a button every now and then to throw a curveball or splitter, which don't really matter because the ball/strike system is basically irrelevant due to how easy it is to hit the ball.

And I'll be honest, I never liked boxing even when I was younger. The nunchuck and Wii remote combo is very inconsistent, the latter lining up shots just fine because it's a motion tool, but the nunchuck isn't really built for that, so the left hand shots are harder to line up in the process. And at the risk of sounding lazy, this game just gets way too tiring for me to want to keep coming back to it. After two rounds of me flailing my arms and bobbing and ducking, I'm already tired of it. This is a sport that works much better in a party sort of setting, but by yourself, it can be exhausting.

Overall, when it comes to Wii Sports, even for as simple and possibly unimpressive as it is, I have too much nostalgia baked into me from this game to call it below average. There really is just this timeless quality to it that, even when I feel I've played this game down to its most barebones qualities, I still find myself coming back to it, especially around the company of friends and family. And when a piece of media is able to do that over time in good jest, I couldn't possibly look down upon it.

This game came paired with the Nintendo Wii, and is an absolute classic. Its one of the few games that you can get anyone to play, even people who never play video games.

Playing with friends and/or family is the best way to play, as it is the way it is intended. Playing by yourself, while fun, just doesn't compare.

There's a few sports to choose from:

-Tennis
-Baseball
-Ten-pin Bowling
-Golf
-Boxing

The most popular of these is easily bowling. Its the quickest and easiest mode and is honestly more fun than actual bowling. This is because I am shit at bowling in real life.

Apart from playing with friends and family, my favourite part of this game is just laughing at the various monstrous Miis that I love creating.

I'm completely surprised to see this game anywhere near below a 4.0. Seeing people say, "the game on the Wii people were forced to play" is downright crazy. This game was probably the most enjoyable game to play with friends, having a perfect competitive edge with each game, and great controls. Because of the great controls and self-explanatory games, just about anyone can pick up a controller and play. I find myself after 15 years of having this game, still consistently playing it with my friends, and family. Even to this day I still have loads of fun running up a 2v2 tennis match. And don't even get me started on the soundtrack, I bet I can walk to a random person my age and they could recognize many of the songs in the game because it's just THAT memorable. It just goes to show that even after all this time many people and myself included still have so much fun and the same memories of how great this game is.

For those of you that don’t remember, the Nintendo Wii was nicknamed “the Nintendo Revolution” in its beta form a year before it came out. This ambitious sounding nickname more or less foreshadowed the massive influence Nintendo’s next console would have on the gaming world for an entire generation. In the end, they went with the Nintendo “Wii”, a more twee nickname that spelled out like someone decrypted hieroglyphics from an alien species. Considering how the console sold like hotcakes, “the revolution” would have been more apropos to signify how impactful it was, but Nintendo didn’t quite squander its tongue-in-cheek initiative to take the gaming world by storm. The campaign logo “Wii would like to play”, the “We” in this statement alludes to the mass audience the Wii would garner due to its accessibility supported by the refined motion controls. Over the course of its tenure, the Nintendo Wii became one of the fastest-selling consoles of all time after its international release. The game that was the cause of the Wii’s immediate success was Wii Sports, the game that came with every Wii console that showcased the console’s motion controls.

This wasn’t the first time Nintendo experimented with motion-control peripherals. As far back as the NES era, Nintendo has taken some bold strides to innovate the way that gamers played video games. Accessories like the Power Glove and the NES Zapper were certainly admirable attempts at deviating from the standard method of playing video games but claiming this is still a bit too diplomatic. They still didn’t prove to be more practical than the classic video game controller, so they became confined to the dark, dusty closets of gamers everywhere. Why insist on fixing what isn’t broken and what proves to not need an alternative to be enjoyable? Many generations later, Nintendo stubbornly kept innovating with these ideas and showcased an entire console around an entirely new mechanic. The last time they did this was with the Virtual Boy, a crimson, migraine-inducing disaster that made players bilious in a matter of seconds. The success of the Wii can be attributed to a simple factor that surpassed the other peripherals that failed: it worked. It didn’t sparsely give the player signs of life whenever the damn thing felt it was convenient; the Wii remote was as fluid and capable as your own body. After so many generations of failed products, they got it right.

What better to showcase this achievement in video game innovation than Wii Sports, a simple game with a selection of five different sports that are popular worldwide. After all, everyone loves sports! (Not me, the one-eyed, hapless nerd that didn’t get his first kiss until he was 17.) Sports are the pinnacle of worldwide wholesome entertainment, so the accessibility factor of the content matched with the innovative controls was destined to be a smash hit. You had a choice of five different sports to play and each of them was fully functional with the controls. The playable characters were the Mii’s, the avatar creations made on the Wii menu. If you were an uncreative sucker, you’d make a Mii of yourself play this game, but us true innovators used this feature to make an army of playable characters composed of notable figures. My only hole-in-one in golf was made by Darth Vader, and my highest bowling score is with Tourettes Guy.

All of these games more or less played exactly like you were participating in these sports in real life. Tennis involved hitting a green ball back and forth across a net, golf involved smacking a ball off the grass while minding wind conditions, baseball was played on a diamond field with a team of players, and bowling involved knocking down pins rolling a ball down a slicked, Maplewood lane. Boxing, my personal favorite of the five, introduced the nunchuck, an attachment to the Wiimote with an analog stick and two additional buttons. You hit your enemies with both the Wiimote and the nunchuck acting as both arms and punch accordingly just like real boxing. It was like a kinetic version of Punch-Out!! To make these sports believably immersive, all you had to execute on the Wiimote was a simple swipe most of the time, making for the most hands-on and simple way to play all of these sports in a video game.

As someone who doesn’t like sports, did I have fun with this game? Absolutely. Nothing was more exciting to me than the Nintendo Wii, my first foray in experiencing a new console generation. Getting the first taste of what the console had to offer was a rousing affair, but the novelty of the motion controls wore off quickly. This game is simple to a fault as there is nothing much else to do after you play each of these sports a couple of times. This is even the case playing this game with friends. After testing what the Wii had to offer with Wii Sports, one can’t help but to want more from the system and its controls.

After the success of the Wii, motion controls became an industry-sweeping phenomenon. Sony implemented a risque-looking motion controller that looked an awful lot like a sex toy and Microsoft had the Kinect which did away with tangible peripherals entirely. Alas, the old guard of using a standard controller triumphed over the new guard. The motion controls of the Wii ultimately became a fad instead of the revolution Nintendo had strived for. Today, Wii Sports and the Wii itself are as archaic as they were in that South Park episode that depicted one in the distant future. However, that doesn’t mean that the impact of the game is lost. Wii Sports ushered in the “casual gamer market” that is now monopolized by the mobile gaming industry. Thousands of people that did not care about video games one way or another were waiting in long lines to purchase them. My grandfather, who has discrepancies with most things that aren’t guns, beer, or golf, has said that video games are to blame for crime, drugs, and all sorts of perversions in the world. Yet, he bought a Wii before I even had one because Wii Sports looked so alluring to him. That fact alone is the reason why the novelty of Wii Sports deserves a place to be remembered as a milestone in video gaming.

It did its job for the time, being maybe the best pack-in game ever. The five games have some amount of nuance, but the best ones would be perfected by proper titles down the line (Tiger Woods on Wii is pretty decent) or just plain control better with a real controller. Boxing, for example, is kinetic and satisfying but damn unreliable, and tennis is way too hands-off.