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.
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.
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