Kororinpa: Marble Mania

 

    So since Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz was a pretty bad marble game, the obvious solution would be to play more marble games, and hence, Kororinpa: Marble Mania by Hudson Soft. If you're anything like me, you looked at that title and thought “what the heck is a Kororinpa?” I had a feeling that it was probably a portmanteau of words that made sense in Japanese, like how Katamari Damacy roughly translates to “clump soul”. Doing some cursory searches online, “koro” simply means for something to roll, sensible for marbles, while “rinpa” was a historical school of decorative art that had a heavy emphasis on nature. I feel like I'm way off-base with the latter, not that it matters much, as in-game, it simply uses the term “Kororinpa” to refer to a stage.
    So about those stages, and by extension, the controls. Like with Banana Blitz, it requires holding the Wii Remote forward at a level angle, and tilting it around to tilt the stage, thus moving your marble. Different marbles can be selected from the main menu before you begin a stage, unlocking more as you complete the game, with each one either altering the physics of the marble in some way, or are just there for the sake of looking cute. Unlike the Super Monkey Ball games, however, there's no limit to how much you can rotate a stage; while those had a maximum limit on the angles possible, here, you can turn the stage on its side or even fully upside down if you want. It makes it so the later levels resemble less of a traditional marble maze and more of a Perplexus sphere, making you alter gravity constantly in order to reach your goal. There's also crystals that can be picked up within each level, with red crystals being required to open the goal, and green crystals being an optional challenge to eventually unlock secret stages with.
    Personally, even though it uses a similar control set up to Banana Blitz, I found this to be way more manageable and fun to control. I never had to move the controller that much for it to register which way I was twisting, with it also not being too sensitive or twitchy. The tilting itself is also eerily accurate considering this game came out long before Wii MotionPlus was introduced, so stuff like thin passageways or tight turns were never an issue. It also meant I could pull of some neat trick shots when needed; there was one level where I forgot a crystal earlier on, but I was able to tilt the level back, launch the marble up, and catch it with the other end of the level. On the subject of the crystals, I like that the lack of lives and the requirement to pick the red ones up means that there's actually a point to having collectibles in the level, making you engage with the level design more and be more daring when needed. It makes for a game with an incredibly well-balanced difficulty curve, getting considerably challenging without going overboard.
    There are forty-five levels in total, with fifteen secret stages to unlock by grabbing the aforementioned green crystals, and a mirror mode once you complete the main stages. The main stages are split into groups with different visual themes, consisting of a garden, candy world, city at day, toy world, and city at night. Going on about aesthetics further, while it can be a bit plain at times, there is something of a bespoke charm about it. The visuals are clear enough to make the marble rolling easy, while having some quaint dioramas in the background, like a variety of baking supplies lined around a table in the background of the candy world. The music is also rather charmingly whimsical, exciting enough to motivate you while being calm enough to not get on the nerves while repeating stages, with the secret stages being host to some great remixes of music from classic Hudson Soft games like Bomberman and Milon's Secret Castle.
    Of course, even with forty-five stages, their short length means that the main game can be beaten in about two hours or so if you're good enough. This is where the multiplayer comes in, because in a surprising rarity for marble games, it has an actual multiplayer mode. Every stage from the single player mode can be played within it, and you both race through each level within split-screen, trying to get a better time than the other. The different selectable marbles actually come into play quite a bit here, as it means there's some strategy in choosing either an easier to control but slower marble, or a faster but more unwieldy marble. The split-screen does mean that the visibility becomes a slight issue, as you can only see so much ahead of you, but it overall is a fun time, and contains some quality of life features to keep the pace up if one player is lagging too far behind.
    Safe to say, I came away from Kororinpa: Marble Mania quite impressed. Considering how I routinely bounce off of other games similar to it, I was surprised by how much I got into this game and how much fun I was having. Perhaps the aesthetics of it are a bit dry and could leave some wanting more, but the core gameplay is solid enough to where it doesn't matter that much. Plus, lucky me, there's a sequel called Marble Saga: Kororinpa that is supposedly even better, and I can't wait to play that when I eventually get around to it. I think I'm mostly good on marble games for now, though, and I probably should stop for a while so I don't start unconsciously rolling my food around on the table.

WarioWare: Smooth Moves

 

    So if you recall some of the Wii commercials from when it first launched, they showed people getting up off the couch and doing a bunch of exaggerated motions in order to control the games. Obviously people know now that's not how it works, you can play most of the Wii library just fine sitting on the couch with simple wrist flicks, but that's how it was marketed, misleading as it probably was. In retrospect, it did make people look pretty silly while playing the console, and I guess some of the devs at Nintendo must've thought the same thing, considering that they made an entire game based around looking as much like an utter doofus as possible.
    In case you somehow don't know what led to this point, Wario started off as simply an evil version of Mario, making his debut in Super Mario Land 2 and later getting his own series in the form of the Wario Land games. His series would gradually splinter further and further away from Mario, getting wackier and more off-beat with every single entry, until it got so crazy that it transcended any standard notion of gameplay entirely with the WarioWare series. How they work is that you have a large collection of microgames, essentially extremely small bursts of gameplay that you have to figure out within only a couple seconds, and you have to complete as many as you can until you run out of lives. The microgames in question are presented with a very “programmers messing around” sense of humor, to which is extended by way of a range of unlockable minigames and weird doodads to play with, making use of the hardware in a creative way. WarioWare: Smooth Moves is the first major installment on a home console, barring the GameCube version that was just a conversion of Mega Microgame$ with multiplayer, and as such is fully based around inventive uses for the Wii Remote.
    The main difference between Smooth Moves and the games preceding it is that the controls in previous games, while used in creative ways, were intentionally limited as to keep things snappy. Mega Microgame$ only used the D-pad and A button, Twisted is much the same with an internal gyro sensor, and Touched mostly used just the DS touchscreen. Smooth Moves, by contrast, has you using the Wii Reomte in every possible way imaginable. The game has what it calls forms, basically different ways you have to hold the Wii Remote, all explained with a hilariously calm voiceover whenever a new one is introduced. The forms can be anything from simply holding the Wii Remote forward or sideways, to more unconventional like holding it at your hip or setting it on a table. It'll display the form you need to use before a microgame appears, and while it does slow down the pace of the game slightly, it's a necessary addition to make sure you understand what the game is asking of you.
    The forms in question end up combining with WarioWare's usual sense of humor in really clever ways, often leading the player in question to look almost as ridiculous as whatever's happening on screen. As one might imagine, it escalates in difficulty and outlandishness further with each stage, until it reaches the point where you do things like become part of the most awkward dancing troupe imaginable. Of course, you don't need to mimic the forms exactly, as quite a few of the motions aren't more complex than a single shake or twist, but given how unabashedly silly the game is, it's simply a more fun experience to embrace the wackiness of it all. Plus, given just the sheer number of microgames in the package, it's impressive how many of them work without issue. The only ones that gave me trouble were any with inward and outward movement, as for whatever reason, that resulted in the motion becoming shaky, but I'd somehow win the microgame anyway when that happened, so it wasn't that much of an issue.
    Of course, it wouldn't be a WarioWare game without the random unlockables, and at first, I was a little bit disappointed. They initially seemed a bit thin on the ground compared to previous games, barring the resident Pyoro game and an admittedly really fun 3D remake of a mode from Balloon Fight. That was until I discovered that the rest of the unlockables were hiding out in the multiplayer mode, and it thankfully did not disappoint. It offers four different modes to play the microgames with your friends in, and they all manage to be just as hectic, if not moreso than the single player mode. Weirdly, though, something I was really impressed with was the darts minigame; how it works is that you hold the Wii Remote, literally throw it like a dart, and let the wrist strap catch and pull back the Wii Remote as you throw it. It's a pretty ingenious use for an element of the controller most probably wouldn't even consider, although obviously it doesn't work if you don't have a wrist strap, unless you really want to break your Wii Remote on the floor.
    Smooth Moves is simply a really solid entry in the franchise, easily the best multiplayer WarioWare experience you can get. Funnily enough, for all my praise, it's not quite my favorite entry in the franchise; I think Twisted has the best pacing and microgames of any of them, and D.I.Y. is simply really fun to create stuff in. That being said, most of the WarioWare games are of a similar quality to each other, so it's like comparing really good apples to slightly better apples, and in that regard, Smooth Moves still ranks among the higher tier of them. It's perfect to pick up if you want a party game for the Wii, but feel that other party games don't have enough nose-picking simulations.

Sonic and the Secret Rings

 

 

 

    The critical reappraisal of the 2000's Sonic games has increasingly mystified me as time has gone on. I initially thought it was some kind of inside joke, like everyone spontaneously agreed to call Heroes, Shadow, '06 and so on good, as part of the Internet's continual irony or post-irony or whatever. As time has gone on, though, it's gotten to the point where there are hundreds of full-blown essays defending the titles, elements from those games called back to in more recent entries, and even a full-blown blockbuster movie trying desperately to make sense of Sonic Adventure 2's plot. Not that I don't entirely get why; part of it is just nostalgia on people's end, but there are a couple worthwhile elements from that era, namely the good soundtracks and the hilarious cutscenes. However, I feel the need to disabuse the recent praise somehow, and this blog being what it is, my attention was drawn towards the Sonic game that even the most rabid fans won't go to bat for.
    The premise of Sonic and the Secret Rings goes that one day, a genie named Shahra pops out of a copy of the Arabian Nights tales, and tells Sonic that their entire world is under threat due to Erazor Djinn, another genie set on erasing the stories told within. Sonic, naturally, is the only one that can travel inside and save their world because that's just kind of what he does, either that or he recently got his Bachelor's degree in Middle Eastern studies. Along the way he encounters figures like King Shahryar, Ali Baba, Sinbad and so on, all taking the form of established Sonic characters, along with him having to collect seven world rings in order to put a stop to Erazor Djinn's plan. It's nothing all that interesting, but there are at least a couple of those classic nonsensical lines you'd expect from the series, and the hand-drawn illustrations during the cutscenes are legitimately nice. The visuals in general are far and away the best thing about the game, with environments being rather varied and detailed, though that's where any praise I have for the game stops.
    The conceit with Secret Rings is that it's an auto-runner, in that brief window right before they would become one of the dominant game genres on smartphones, and the thing is that I don't hate the idea in concept. Having control over Sonic in a full 3D space in the games preceding felt like piloting a skittish cat trying to cross a wet floor, so simplifying his movement and putting him on a linear track would theoretically be a step in the right direction. There are two major issues with this, however; one is that despite the limited controls, the level design is trying to still be akin to previous 3D Sonic levels, meaning that it often expects a level of exploration and player finesse that you're not going to get out of a Sonic that never stops running and relies on tilt controls. The other is that, with no exaggeration, the game has some of the most broken and unresponsive controls of any platformer I've ever played.
    The only thing that reliably works is tilting the Wii Remote to move Sonic left and right, which while sluggish, is at least bearable. Everything else is either extremely delayed, comes with arbitrary restrictions, or is outright glitched and will stop working entirely. As Sonic never stops running and is locked to the pathway of the level, it guarantees Sonic will be at the mercy of haphazardly placed enemies and traps every two seconds. The jump and brake buttons both attempt to slow Sonic down, but Sonic will continue to slide forward even as you hold the button down, meaning you'll often slam into the obstacle you were trying to avoid in the first place. Even backing up requires constant movement, resulting in any preparation for platforming becoming an awkward patience-testing shuffle. All of that is combined with mechanics that are outright broken, as the homing attack often won't register even when Sonic is right next to an enemy, and grind rails refuse to let Sonic jump and detach from them. All of it combines to an experience where even the most basic of tasks becomes a never-ending whirlwind of pain for the poor hedgehog, with any of the upgrades along the way being of no help.
    Even ignoring the controls, the sheer repetition of the game is enough to make someone go insane. The game only has seven stages, not counting a tutorial world, and after completing a stage, the game requires that you play them over and over again with random stipulations, like not dying once or finding specific objects. The game will open up multiple objectives after completing one, and whether or not they'll open up a path to the next world is completely arbitrary, meaning you'll often replay a stage again and again on a mission path that leads nowhere, making you waste your time. It's compounded by the fact that voice lines from Sonic and Shahra will constantly repeat upon death, and the low amount of music variety makes for a special kind of irritating. The main theme especially seems determined to drill its way into your head; it's the first thing you hear on the Wii Menu, it plays when selecting a level, it plays when you beat a mission, it plays when you fail a mission, it'll probably play in your sleep.
    The entire experience drove me up a wall, to the point where even the mediocre party mode became something of a reprieve, just because it will sometimes function as intended and is overall more soberly designed. Even with that small bright spot, though, it does not excuse the baffling awfulness of the main game. It's not just one of the worst Sonic games, but one of the worst installments of any platforming franchise, and I'm honestly shocked it didn't immediately kill the series upon its release. I'm at least thankful the series kept going so games like Colors, Sonic Generations, Mania and Shadow Generations could come into existence, but it's worth keeping the series' past in mind to make sure something like this never happens again.

Wii Play

 

    Wii Sports pretty much cemented its legacy from the moment it came out, being the pack-in for the console and being instantly understandable to everyone that played it. Naturally, people wanted more of it, and Nintendo immediately followed up on it, kind of. Another launch title for the Wii in everywhere but the US, Wii Play was another simple minigame collection, albeit with a different focus. While Wii Sports obviously focused on sports, something that people that didn't play video games would more or less know how to jump into, Wii Play feels like it was a way to ease that same audience into more typical video game design language, with slightly more abstract games that mostly focused on the Wii Remote's pointing functionality. To sweeten the deal, it came bundled with a Wii Remote, which was normally forty dollars by itself, leaving the de facto price of Wii Play to be ten bucks. The difference is, I think most of Wii Play isn't anywhere near as substantial as Wii Sports.
    Keyword being most of, and I'll describe the exceptions in deal when I get to them, but I'll quickly summarize the games I don't have much to say about. Shooting Range is a short throwback to NES Zapper games like Duck Hunt and Hogan's Alley, containing five short waves where you shoot down balloons, targets, clay pigeons, cans and UFOs, with some ducks in there as an optional target. It's fine enough, but it's over very quickly and doesn't have any sort of variance with repeated visits. Find Mii simply tasks you with finding certain Miis amidst a crowd, using the Miis you created to populate every level; it's longer and more varied than Shooting Range, but it's also nothing special in the slightest. Table Tennis is a simple rally back and forth across a ping-pong table, and it makes me wonder how many people swung the Wii Remote at this point, confused that it didn't work like Tennis in Wii Sports.
    Pose Mii is the first game to shake things up in any significant way, being that on top of using the A and B buttons to switch between poses, you also have to twist the Wii Remote to fit your Mii into the right angle of the bubbles falling. It can get pretty hectic as it goes on, but is overall just okay. Laser Hockey is the point where a lot of people reviewing this game would say it's just Pong, but that's where they're wrong, because I'm enough of a game history nut to know it's actually just Hockey for the Fairchild Channel F. Unlike Pong, you can rotate the paddle and move it in all four directions, but it doesn't change the fact that I've had to talk about two different games in here that are some variant of tennis. Billiards is the first sort of in-depth game in the collection, being that it's a straightforward game of pool, and works about as well as you'd expect it to. You angle the shot, line up the cue stick, pull back and watch it go; it controls really well, especially considering a lot of Wii games surprisingly had trouble with any forward and back motion.
    Fishing isn't gonna win any prizes among the storied history of fishing minigames, but it's executed decently enough. You sit by a lake and catch paper fish within a time limit, each type of fish being worth a different point value, with bonus points awarded for catching specific fish the game tells you to. It's alright, but it's worth noting that the small fry fish are the most entitled jerks in the history of gaming, constantly gravitating to your hook even though catching one makes you lose fifty points. Charge is the most out of place game in the entire collection, being that it doesn't use the pointing functionality at all, but rather you have to tilt the Wii Remote forward, left and right to steer a knitted cow headlong into scarecrows. It's the most throwaway game out of the bunch, being that there's only one stage, and the only replay value comes from trying to get a better time.
    So far, while most of these games play alright, most of them wouldn't warrant spending more than a few minutes on them. Then all of the sudden, Tanks appears, far and away the most in-depth and challenging game of the bunch. It's the only game to use the Nunchuk, and it's a methodical top-down shooter that takes inspiration from Combat on the Atari 2600, having you control a toy tank shooting at other toy tanks. Considering Wii Play's casual focus, Tanks is surprisingly pretty murderously difficult, with one hundred stages to complete and it only giving you so many lives, and if you lose all of them, you get sent back to the beginning. It makes for a pretty awesome challenge, especially with how the tanks you face off against all having unique properties, and the movement of the tanks being slow and methodical. It's easy to understand why this is the most beloved game of the bunch, even getting an indie spiritual successor in the form of Wee Tanks (ha), and I agree wholeheartedly that this is the game with the most value.
    That, however, is about it for Wii Play. There's not really much else to it aside from the multiplayer, where you compete against a friend to get a higher score with some changes to the game rules to accommodate, but it's a bit perplexing that it only allows for two players. It was never intended to be more than a simple demonstration of the Wii Remote, much like Wii Sports, but I think the fact that it wasn't bundled in with the console resulted in it being held to far more scrutiny back in the day. Personally, all of it functions as intended and has that Nintendo level of polish you'd expect, but the simplicity is a bit of a detriment, with a lot of the games not having much going on. That being said, Tanks alone makes it worth trying out if you somehow haven't already, and you can find the game for dirt cheap most places, so there's no harm in trying it if you want.

Excite Truck

 

    People that buy a console at launch, I've noticed, have a tendency to also buy “tide-me-over” games. What I mean by that is, there might be a game that they're anticipating down the line, but since it isn't out yet, they buy a similar enough game to the one they're waiting for to kill some time. I imagine while Wii owners were waiting for the system's Mario Kart game to come out, they picked up Excite Truck in the meantime. As the name implies, the game is part of the Excite series, which traces back all the way to Excitebike on the NES. Despite being an official Nintendo racing series, it never gained quite the same fan base as Mario Kart or even F-Zero, mostly because of its presentation being a fair bit dry compared to the instant recognizability of Mario Kart or the sci-fi cool of F-Zero. With this game, however, there is definitely an active attempt to give it more of its own identity.
    Start the game up and you're greeted with a mandatory tutorial, although one I'm actually pretty thankful for, as the game does function pretty differently compared to your typical racing game. Excite Truck, at its core, is all about the stunts. Pretty much every special action or motion does a different type of trick, and there's tons to do within the tracks to make your driving look more stylish. Everything from going through rings, narrowly grazing past trees, turbo-boosting off of ramps and even crashing your truck in a cool way will earn you points. It's such an integral part of the game that it's not only encouraged, but required; getting in first place may still be a part of each race, but it won't count as a win if you didn't do some cool stuff to reach that point. The unorthodox scoring system is more in line with a skating game or even a spectacle fighter, making it so the goal becomes stringing combos of stunts together as smoothly as possible.
    Of course, what holds it all together is the trucks feeling pretty good to control. It uses what would become the standard for Wii racing games, holding the Wii Remote on its side and using it akin to a steering wheel. The trucks have the right amount of traction to them, with none of the steering feeling oversensitive or anything like that, and the wheels of the trucks will even account for how much you tilt the Wii Remote forward or back, to give you a boost if you land parallel to the ground. The only part of the controls I found problematic were the air spins, where you have to hold the 1 button down and swing it back and forth to spin, but I could never quite get it to work consistently. That's the only major issue, though, as the feel of the game is pretty much on point for what it's going for.
    That being said, even with its unique gameplay, it doesn't really add much on the visual or sound end to match. It is very much still just a truck game in that regard, none of said trucks having much in the way of visual flair and the tracks mostly being straightforward off-road ventures. The track selection may list real-world countries as their basis, but the theming doesn't go beyond “this is the snow level” or “this is the desert level”. There are icons you can hit that terraform the levels in real-time to make them easier to trick off of, but the effect loses its wow factor after the first couple times. The meh presentation extends to the sound too; while the sound of the trucks has that important crunch to it, the music is pretty lackluster, consisting of completely forgettable instrumental hard rock tracks. It does at least let you load custom MP3s from your SD card, which is a nice feature.
    All in all, though, what holds it back in the long run is that, being a launch title, there's not a lot to do and it gets somewhat repetitive. The game has four cups of increasing difficulty, with one unlockable extra-hard track at the end, so most of your time will be spent completing those to make all the tracks available for multiplayer. There is a challenge mode, but it's nothing to write home about; go through gates, go through rings, smash other cars, and that's about it with only six challenge maps to speak of. You could go for S-ranks or the game's built-in achievements if you really want, but by that point your patience with the generic guitar riffs will start wearing thinner than the amount of content the game has.
    There is something there, though, I feel. Even with its bland style and sparse amount of stuff to do, the utterly unique stunt system is enough to make it engaging for as long as it lasts. It's the kind of game where, if renting games were still a thing, it would perfectly fit that specific need and have just enough entertainment to fill a weekend. I hear ExciteBots, this game's sequel, does address a lot of what I complained about with this game, and I will get to it eventually. For this, though, it's a good enough racing game with a very well-realized, unique idea at its core, and if you're willing to learn its mechanics, I'd say it's definitely worth giving a try, at the very least.

Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz

 

    So picture this, you're Sega in 2006. Nintendo has put out this wacky new console with a focus on motion controls, and they're asking you to make a launch title for it. Whatever are you going to do to make full use of this strange gimmick? The answer, of course, is obvious: “monkey.”
    In case you're somehow unaware, Super Monkey Ball is a series where you are Monkey In Ball, Esq. and have to maneuver them through obstacle courses by tilting the level itself. It's basically a more elaborate take on a marble maze, and you'd think not a lot of people would be passionate about that, but to call this a divisive entry in the series is massively understating it. A lot of people treat Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz like it delivered a plague unto their houses or something, and it left me very confused for the longest time. It was actually the first game in the series I ever played, and I remember liking it fine enough at the time. Going back to it now, while I think the hate for it is massively overblown, I can't exactly say the game was enjoyable either.
    I will say that the obnoxious thing about the GameCube entries for me was that, while they have a solid gameplay foundation with fantastic controls, the level design can get downright sadistic, to the point it feels like it's a ROM hack of itself. The funny thing is that on some design aspects, it's actually made to be rather sensible; the level design is dialed back to be far more forgiving, so you're no longer clipping underneath mechanical colossi or selecting the correct switch to not die. They even added a jump button to the game, both so you could save yourself at the last second and also to give the levels more variation. On the subject of positives, the music is actually pretty awesome, as required per Sega law, with the snow level theme being an easy standout.
    However, this game ends up having the opposite problem of those earlier installments, in that the controls are extremely unreliable. I don't mind motion controls, I wouldn't have started a Wii blog if I did, but it's the way they were implemented here that poisons my potato chips. My first thought was that you would hold the Wii Remote like a joystick and tilt it around to move your monkey, akin to the original Monkey Ball arcade game with the banana joystick. While you still tilt the Wii Remote to move, the default position of the Wii Remote is pointed towards the screen, with no way to change it. I find to tilt it forward, I have to move my wrist to very uncomfortable angles, no matter how I held the Wii Remote. It's compounded by the fact that even the slightest nudge will send your monkey flying off in a random direction, resulting in a fair few unfair deaths.
    This all comes to a head with the boss battles, which were a new addition to the series with this installment. Most of them are pretty standard, being either “hit the glowing spots in a circular arena” or “hit the glowing spots after completing a smaller course”. A sound idea in theory, but often the boss's elaborate animations will completely push the monkey off the stage, in a way that doesn't feel intentional. That octopus fight in particular was absolutely awful with this, since you have to account for any slight movement of the octopus's limbs that could send you off into the water. At the very least, the boss battles are mercifully brief once you get the hang of them.
    Of course, it wouldn't be a Super Monkey Ball game without the minigames, and this game features fifty of them to choose from. It hindsight, it's pretty much the blueprint for every single Wii minigame collection going forward, and has about the same level of quality variance. While some of them can be a decent time, like Dangerous Course and Monkey Target, it also has quite a few that were very obviously not playtested, like Trombone or Alien Attack. The variety and ensuing randomness could prove to be a fun time with friends, but you're going to eventually hit a point where you play something like Monkey Bowling, and wonder why you aren't playing Wii Sports instead, with its significantly worse controls.
    I feel like this game definitely came out underbaked, as with some tweaks, it could prove to be a pretty fun time. However, it's very clear it was rushed to meet the Wii launch, with its frustrating controls and unfinished-feeling minigames. It feels important to note that this game got a remaster in the form of Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD, and while that does swap the motion controls for more traditional analog stick inputs, it also replaces the music and changes the level design to ramp up the difficulty significantly, so it becomes a very pick your poison kind of choice. The game in its original form very much represents the start of the long, awkward journey developers had getting to grips with programming controls for the Wii Remote, although whether or not they ever truly figured it out is debatable, especially on Sega's end.

Wii Sports

 

 

 

    Who do you suppose was the first person to accidentally throw their Wii Remote into the TV? Tell me you couldn't picture it; someone there at the very launch of the system, spending the whole day setting it up, creating their Miis, getting right into a tennis match until wham! The very first instance someone forgot to put on their wrist strap, sending a cascading ripple effect for similar events across the world until it becomes the most iconic joke made about the Wii. Putting it that way gives it an oddly poignant perspective, a collective breaking of every gaming tradition and barrier up to that point. Perhaps it makes the hassle of buying a new TV sting a bit less, knowing you were right at the precipice of a revolution.
    Anyway, do I even need to waste your time talking about why Wii Sports was good? I feel like if you're reading the first post of a brand new blog specifically themed around the Wii, chances are,you've already played it at some point. It's one of the best selling video games of all time and brought in a massive new audience of people that, up to that point, probably didn't even play video games beforehand, all thanks to both the game's simplicity and the motion controls of the Wii Remote itself. Whether or not that popularity was a blessing or a detriment is debatable, you'll find a large number of older people that think the Wii was just this game and nothing else, but there's no denying it still had a pretty significant impact at the time. That does raise the question on whether or not the game still holds up nearly twenty years later, and as such, I went back to give it a try.
    Wii Sports is a very basic collection of five mini-games in total, those being tennis, baseball, bowling, golf and boxing. Most of them can be played with just the Wii Remote, save for boxing, which requires the Nunchuk.  It also comes with three training mini-games for each of the five games, along with a “Wii Fitness” mode, which just puts a random selection of training mini-games together and grades you at the end. As the games are so simple, I can quickly go through each of them in order.
    Tennis is exactly how you would expect, and is far and away the most simple out of all the already simple games. Swinging the Wii Remote swings the tennis racket, and that's all you need to do; you don't even have to move your Mii around, as they'll get into position to hit the ball back automatically. It actually tracks the angle at which you hit the ball surprisingly precisely, allowing for some trick shots and close saves, with instances of it detecting the wrong angle or missing its cue entirely being quite rare. It is somewhat bizarre that you can only do doubles matches, especially in single-player, where you have to go up against two computer players with two copies of yourself, but it's not something I particularly mind. Overall, it works about as well as it needs to, and is pretty fun.
    Baseball is condensed from its real-life counterpart, with the inning count being reduced from nine to three, and other simplifications like the number of plates you can run to being determined by how long the automated catchers take to reach the ball. The controls for batting are about as simple as tennis, but I find them to be a lot more unreliable here. I'll do my best to swing the bat in the exact same way, and it seems even odds whether the baseball will go sailing out of the park, or pitifully sent backwards into the foul ball zone. Pitching is easier to get a hold of, with it picking up the speed at which you throw the ball, and also allowing for things like curveballs, screwballs and splitters by holding down the A and/or B buttons. While the simplifications are welcome, baseball is simply okay here.
    Bowling is far and away the best mini-game of the entire collection, and a pretty good contender for the best bowling game ever made. You set up the position and angle of your shot, hold down B and start swinging, and then release B at the end of your swing to send the ball rolling. The controls feel absolutely perfect, and the speed at which you can blast through all ten frames makes it easy to pick up at any time. I also love all the smaller touches that simply add to the experience, like how if you throw the ball backwards, all the Miis will jump and yell in surprise. If there's any game that will keep you coming back to revisit Wii Sports, it's this one.
    Golf is one mini-game I'm pretty bad at, so in that sense, it's accurate to how bad I am at golf in real life. You select which club to use, line up your shot with the D-pad, approach the ball with the A button, and then swing away. The courses are remasters on the ones from Golf on the NES, which is a neat detail along with the variable wind speed of each course, making it so you can't predict exactly where your ball will land no matter how good you get at the game. Much like tennis, it works as well as it needs to, although the somewhat limited number of courses does hinder its replayability a bit.
    Boxing is the odd one out between all the mini-games, as not only does it require the Nunchuk, but it's also the most “game-ified” of all the sports. You have to balance dodging the other opponent's attacks and finding the correct moment to throw your own punches, trying to get their health bar to zero. Whether or not they're knocked out or will get back up is dependent on how quickly their health dropped to zero, and how many times they've gotten back up already. It was definitely designed with the intent to show the Nunchuk's motion control capabilities, but it ended up faltering a fair bit. The Nunchuk isn't nearly as accurate as the Wii Remote with detecting motion, and even with that, it expects you to do incredibly specific motions that are finicky to pull off. It's simply mediocre, especially in comparison to the other games.
    Speaking of having to do specific motions that the controls aren't accurate enough to handle, the training games, which is where the experience starts to crack a bit for me. A lot of the training mini-games expect way more from the motion controls than can reasonably be expected, such as trying to hit targets or angles with narrow room for error, and thus a lot of them are over very quickly. That's not to say they're all bad, as a couple of them can prove to be a good time; the Power Throws training game for bowling, where you have to knock down an increasingly large number of pins, is far and away the best of the bunch. For the most part, though, it proves to be a relatively throwaway part of the package, in a game that's already pretty light on content.
    Although, does the lack of content really matter? It was bundled in with the console, after all, and for a console pack-in, it does exactly what it needs to do. It showcases the motion controls of the Wii Remote in an incredibly easy to understand and concise way, all while having the kind of distinct charm that only Nintendo could pull off. A couple of the mini-games are a smidge clunky in hindsight, but for how effortlessly the rest of it plays, it's really not something that detrimental. It says a lot that out of all the launch window Wii games that I have, Wii Sports is the one I keep wanting to go back to play, because even though it doesn't have much to do, what is there has remained pretty timeless.