Mario Party 8

 

    A bright sunny day shines upon the Mushroom Kingdom, blimps and hot air balloons adorning the skyline as the Mario Party 8 logo gets carried along by a pair of Paragoombas. What they fly over is the Star Carnival, circus tents everywhere as balloons fly up, everything with oddly realistic textures applied to it considering that it's a Mario game. No time to dwell on that, though, because moments later, a creature that looks like a cross between Caine from The Amazing Digital Circus and the background characters in Monkeybone flies right up to the screen and welcomes you to the Star Carnival. He and his sentient hat invite you to try any of the modes and have fun, flying away as the odd mix of ideas in Mario Party 8 gets set in stone.
    Mario Party 8 was the last of what's deemed the original run of Mario Party games, what with the first eight entries being developed by Hudson Soft. It's not one of the most glamorous Nintendo series by any means, but in terms of multiplayer games, they're pretty unmatched in both their ease of accessibility and how insane they can be with how unfair they are. They're the perfect games to get out at where else but a party, watching as your friends slowly go from getting chip crumbs all over your couch to fiercely screaming mad about how Yoshi got three stars in a row. While they're all surprisingly consistent in quality considering they were released year after year, 8 seems to be one of the more divisive entries, both at the time it released and now, for specific ways it tried to change up the formula, if to a lesser extreme than later games.
    The first and most obvious difference is that it's played with motion controls; it's a minigame collection on the Wii, it was bound to be this way. Pretty much every minigame now has an extra page of rules showing how to control it, and pretty much any use of the Wii Remote you can think of is represented here. In a game with seventy-three minigames, whether or not those controls are intuitive is always on a case-by-case basis, but I don't really mind that here. Mario Party has always dealt with randomness to an extent, whether it be the boards deciding to send players' progress back on a whim or a minigame that you just don't understand. Adding in motion controls levels the playing field even further, as even if someone gets really good at one specific control style, they won't necessarily be good at the rest of them. Plus, even if you do hate the motion controls, or wanna play the game online through emulation and netplay, there's a mod that lets you use GameCube controllers if you really need to.
    The second change is that every board is designed rather differently compared to previous Mario Party entries. While previous Mario Party boards had board-specific gimmicks, they still kept the general layout structure; 8 takes it much further and gives each board a completely different structure and a different method of obtaining stars, and the end result is a mixed bag. The worst boards are easily the ones that are just straight lines to the finish, Goomba's Booty Boardwalk and Shy Guy's Perplex Express, with the latter being only slightly better due to the unique train setting and the fact the train cars can switch places. Bowser's Warped Orbit, the lone unlockable board, isn't much better; it's entirely circular and the only way to acquire stars is by stealing others' stars, and it results in very lopsided games where one person leads for the whole thing. The other boards, however, are far more replayable and fun, with King Boo's Haunted Hideaway having you find the stars in a randomized, secret layout each time, and DK's Treetop Jungle being a standard Mario Party romp through and through.
    I haven't even gotten to the best board yet, which is so noteworthy that I'm dedicating an entire paragraph to it. Koopa's Tycoon Town is far and away the most in-depth and unique board in the game, and might take the crown as the greatest Mario Party board ever made. The gist of it is that it's Mario Party crossed with Monopoly, as you invest coins into hotels that reward you with stars. Certain amounts of coins will upgrade a hotel to give you more stars, but who the stars go to depends on how many coins you invest into it, and that means others can steal hotels away from you, gaining more stars than you ever had. It injects a new level of strategy into the game that wasn't there before, while still retaining the luck element core to the series, and it results in games where the entire dynamic of who's winning and who's losing can change in an instant.
    While certainly more flawed than some of the previous entries, Mario Party 8 still provides a very high-quality party game option even among the seemingly endless number of party games released for the console. It's quite bizarre than Hudson Soft didn't see the need to follow up on it considering they used to produce the games yearly and would probably sell like crazy on the Wii if they kept at it, though the lackluster half of the boards indicate to me that perhaps they were starting to tire of the series by this point. Indeed, the series went on a lengthy hiatus, after which it would be picked up by Nintendo subsidiary NDcube, where it would flounder for a decade before getting back on track late in the Switch's life. This game is still a good send-off for the classic era of the series, and if you manage to grab some friends willing to accept some of this entry's quirks, it can still provide a fantastic night of people yelling expletives because Peach stole everyone's coins again.

Carnival Games

 

    Chances are, you've heard the term “shovelware” before. It's a catch-all term to describe low-budget games that are quickly made and, for lack of a better word, shoveled out to store shelves just as fast to make a quick buck. They're usually released at a budget price and made to appeal to people that aren't particularly into gaming, taking the form of licensed games, mini-game collections, cash-ins on trends, and so on. Understandably, with the Wii's guaranteed audience being those outside the normal gaming crowd, it got hit with a flood of these types of games, and a lot of people wrote off the console entirely because of it. However, while a fair few of these games were pretty worthless, some were pretty unfairly written off even though they were by no means all that good, like Carnival Games.
    The game is exactly what it says it is, a collection of a bit over twenty games that are based on the kind of thing you'd see at a sketchy traveling carnival. It's split up into five zones, each with their own selection of mini-games to play, and they're about what you'd expect based on the premise. Everything from skee-ball, a dunk tank, strength testing, throwing darts at balloons, knocking down milk bottles; a lot of the most popular types of games make an appearance. The majority of them can be played in either single player or multiplayer, with the single player mode awarding you tickets and prizes for completing each game, which can be used to eventually unlock special variants of games and clothing pieces for your avatar.
    The thing with all these games is that, for at lot of them, the controls can kinda suck. They're responsive enough, but each game has its own bizarre quirk with how exactly it controls. Some of the throwing mini-games are timing-based, but whether or not the aiming reticle will move in a simple motion or swing around randomly is completely up in the air with each game. Sometimes you're able to lock onto a target, but sometimes you're not, turning the balloon popping and football passing games into a lot of hand flailing. Also, physics are not always as they seem, as tossing a coin or a ring can turn into one big guessing game on where they'll slide or bounce to. Most of these result in the process of winning a game coming down to sheer luck, hoping that the planets suddenly align and everything works out in your favor.
    However, I think to some extent, that's kind of the point? If you have ever been to a carnival before, you'd know many of those games are rigged so they're almost never in your favor, leading you to get into that “just one more try” mentality, hoping luck is on your side. In that sense, Carnival Games emulates that pretty much perfectly. A lot of the games, simplistic and unfair as they are, are addicting to replay because you wanna beat the odds. There's no doubt at least some of it is intentional, as for example, the game where you shoot out a paper star with a BB gun has simulated recoil on it to make it way harder. It doesn't excuse every control decision, strength testing requiring swirling your wrist around before swinging the hammer might be a guaranteed way to get carpal tunnel syndrome, but it puts a lot of the game into context.
    Helping the game is that, even though it's a low-budget title, it's got a strange bespoke charm to it that really helps sell the traveling carnival feel. The characters all have this somewhat uncanny quality, looking as though they were pulled right from a vintage circus poster, and the games themselves are made to look as though they've become quite run-down and worn. The announcer has an appropriately old-timey flair to the way he introduces the games, and while you're playing the games, other carnies will heckle you and egg you on to try and do better. It's not amazing by any means, as the music is pretty generic and some sound effects feel like they're missing, but again, it works for what the game sets out to do.
    Carnival Games isn't that great, most wouldn't even dare call it good, but I find its ingenuity with its presentation and the way it works with its limitations to be at least a bit admirable. It managed to invoke a lot of nostalgia in me, both for my own visits to actual carnivals, and for these kinds of fun if mediocre games in general. This is the kind of game that thrived on rentals, bringing it home for the weekend and having a decent time before returning it and not giving it much thought afterwards. In that sense, it truly mimics a day trip to a carnival, and I can't fault it for that. Now as for how it sold over a million copies, I don't think even a rigorous scientific study would explain how that happened.

Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree

 

    The Brain Age games were some of the most important titles on the DS during its heyday. Based on the research of Dr. Ryuta Kawashima, who appears in the game as a polygonal floating head (truly the form we all aspire to be), it sounds pretty boring in concept, just a collection of minigames focused on math problems, brainteasers, the sort of thing most people would associate with homework. However, something about the way it gamifies those aspects – the pacing of it all, being able to write out answers with the stylus, the fantastic sound design – it somehow coalesces into something both fun and helpful. It won't make you smarter, as some were misled to believe, but it can help keep your brain more active in general. On that note, Big Brain Academy is also a series that exists.
    The whole concept of Big Brain Academy is somewhat perplexing, especially considering the original DS entry came out within months of Brain Age's release. It's based around pretty much the same concept, playing some minigames each day to help train your brain to be sharper, and doesn't seem to do a whole lot different on the surface. It is more colorful and cartoony than Brain Age, granted, and perhaps the intent as some point was to make it more game-like than Brain Age ever was. The thing is, I think doing that without adding much to the idea to make it more different highlights how wafer-thin the entire experience is. The one I played, Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree, ends up feeling like something of an unhappy middle ground between Brain Age and WarioWare.
    Doing one of the tests, you'll find five categories: Analyze, Compute, Identify, Memorize and Visualize. They're all roughly self-explanatory, Memorize has you remembering patterns and faces and such, Visualize has you do some forward-thinking, and so on and so forth. Once you complete all five categories, it gives you a “brain mass” based on how many you completed correctly and the speed at which you completed them. Here's where the crux of the issue comes in: each of these categories has only three minigames each (four in one of the multiplayer modes), all of which can be completed in mere seconds. They all charitably require slightly more thought than your average WarioWare microgame, but they still aren't that much more substantial. It makes it so the amount of stuff to do runs dry very quickly, and the game knows it, since it expects you to practice and play the same minigames over and over again.
    This even extends over to the multiplayer mode, which has three different modes in Mind Sprint, Mental Marathon, and Brain Quiz. Mind Sprint has two players completing a set amount of minigames the quickest, and Mental Marathon requires players complete as many of the minigames as possible without messing up. The one unique mode is Brain Quiz, which presents the minigames in a game show format. Each player take turns flipping over a tile with a minigame category on it, getting assigned a difficulty level when they flip it over and the amount of minigames they complete awarding them points. I guess Brain Quiz could prove to be fun for a bit, if only because it frames the minigames a bit differently, but you'll still end up wondering why you aren't playing other party games with more to offer.
    That's my main issue that I hope I've managed to get across, is that Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree suffers from a lack of content. It doesn't really work as an alternative to Brain Age, because while that game is light on stuff to do also, the puzzles it presents are longer and more involved, it has basis in actual scientific research, and it has a sudoku mode if you're one of those freaks that likes sudoku. In comparison to WarioWare, the comparison is unfavorable as well, as even with Brain Quiz adding one more game to each category, the total number of minigames only comes up to twenty, which puts it about one-tenth of a typical WarioWare game, not counting any of the unlockables. Even considering other Wii games with a small amount of content, like Wii Sports or Wii Play, there's still a fair amount of depth you can find with what's included. While all of it functions as intended, it's just incredibly insubstantial, and you can find more fulfilling options than Wii Degree elsewhere.

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.

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.

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.