Wii Sports

"This game makes my friends want to steal my Wii, perhaps I should dock the game points for this misfortune..."

Wii Sports for the Nintendo's new console, the Wii, was a launch game that was also bundled with the system. Because of this fact, I was torn whether to review the game as a tech demo of the Wii's capabilities or as a full-fledged game that deserves as much scrutiny as any other video game. Well, I've come to the conclusion that the latter is how I will handle this game's review, as it was portrayed as a full game as far as I saw.

This title is fairly unique in that it comes with five different sports games on it. Each sport takes advantage of the motion sensing technology on the Wii remote and one also utilizing both the remote and the nunchuck. Unfortunately, in general the games tend to be too short and far too simplistic to hold your attention for too much time. Here is a quick rundown of each game included:

Bowling- If there is one thing that myself and all my friends were in complete agreement about this game, it's that the bowling is the best game of the five included. It just feels so smooth and realistic. Even my dad and his friends got addicted. Really, really addicted. They practically stole my Wii from me, so that tells you that the game is fun for the whole family. Bowling is simple, you hold the remote up in front of you like you would start a normal bowling throw, press one button and hold it, do a regular swing and release the button when the ball gets where you want it to in your stroke. The player can adjust the starting position left and right, and also the angle left and right. So you really can throw a ball exactly how you would in real life, and any shot is possible, whether you want huge spin or minimal spin. Which brings me to my next point: spinning the bowling ball. Just before you release the button to let the ball go, if you flip your wrist, you can put english on the ball. The more you flip your wrist, the more spin is put on the ball. The only downside I found is that it's not exactly flipping your wrist to get the spin, it is actually just the angle of the remote when you let go of the button. A minor flaw that many will never notice and it really doesn't affect anything.

Some timing issues can arise if the player isn't in sync with his or her character in the game, however. My friends and I often times would throw the ball behind us because we would be doing the throw quicker than our character on the screen. This is something that you will get used to quickly, however. The other complaint I have is how the spin works. To put it simply, it doesn't matter which direction of spin you put on the ball, it just matters how much spin you put on the ball. The game decides which direction of spin you need. Therefore, a right handed bowler could start the ball out on the far left side of the lane with a straight angle, put regular right handed spin on it, and it would go right because it doesn't matter which way you spin the ball. Now, normally this is really hard to notice. If the player bowls normally he shouldn't ever notice save for a few tricky spares. Still, sometimes the game really can screw you over putting the wrong kind of spin on the ball than you anticipated, especially with splits, since it doesn't know which pin you're going for. Despite these flaws, the bowling game remains to be extremely fun and realistic.

Golf- This sport had great potential, but it just didn't execute as well as I had hoped. This game is played by holding the remote out in front of you like you're holding a golf club, then pressing and holding A, swinging the remote back, and swinging it forward again, just like a real golf swing. This seems fine at first until you realize that the only thing about your swing that matters is the speed. There is a meter on the screen that is split into four segments. Then there is a small map in the corner of the screen that shows your ball in reference to the hole, and it also shows how far your current club will hit the ball with three hash marks on that line. Each hash mark corresponds to how high up on the meter your swing measured. Filling up the meter 1/4th of the way will reach roughly the first hash mark on the map. Filling up the meter will likewise go to the last hash mark shown on the line on the map. This is the tricky part, however. If you swing the remote too hard, the meter will overfill, and your ball will randomly hook or slice. This is random because the game doesn't care anything about your swing except the speed, as I stated earlier. So, the player is practically forced not to overs-wing, because he doesn't know whether to compensate left or right for a hook or a slice. The game thus ends with the player trying to get just to the top of the meter but not over it (which is pretty easy to do). Also, the harder you swing, the more hook or slice will be on the ball.

The simplistic swing recognition isn't the only problem plaguing the golf sport, either. The game also lacks a full set of clubs. You only bring a driver, an iron (no, it doesn't even have a number), a wedge, and a putter. That's it. Got an in between shot? Too bad. This is especially noticeable when you're in between a driver and an iron. The driver hits it low and it rolls a lot. Sometimes you want an in between, but you can't let it roll very much (for example, there are cliffs in front of and behind the green). This could make you lay up (hit a short shot to be safe) twice on the same hole. I don't get why the developers didn't include more clubs, it seems easy enough to me. If there aren't any hazards to avoid, though, just hitting a higher club about 3/4 of the power works fine.

Another problem I found is hitting out of anything but the fairway. They handled this very oddly. Instead of making the amount that you hit the ball a percentage based on how bad the lie was, the game basically just cuts off your meter bar. Remember how I said the meter was divided into four sections previously? Well, if you get in the rough, just take the top two sections off. Now you can only hit the ball half as far as you normally could. This seems really unfair and unrealistic to me. Not every lie in the rough will make you hit it half as far, and indeed almost no shot will. Hitting out of a sand trap cuts off the top three sections, and since you have to use a wedge your shot can barely go anywhere. This is somewhat expected, though, since hitting out of a bunker is difficult in real life. But in general, these penalties are over the top and are quite frustrating.

As a nice and realistic touch, Nintendo added the wind variable into the equation. On the beginner course, winds are usually barely blowing, and on the advanced courses winds are usually 20-30 miles per hour. That can really change the direction of a ball. This leads to my next disappointment about the game, however. Fact: There are only nine holes on this title. They're split up into three difficulties: Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced, 3 holes each. Then the "9 hole course" is actually just adding all of these courses together. This makes your round go something like... Wow, those three courses were pathetically easy. Those three were all right. Okay these last three were pretty ridiculous. But eh, whatever. I would've liked to seen quite a few more courses. This is another sign that the game was rushed in order to be published and bundled with the Wii launch.

Tennis- This is the sport that I was initially glued to when I started playing the game. This is probably because it's easy to pick up and its flaws are hard to notice at first. First off, the thing about this game that upsets me the most has got to be that I can't control where my character runs. The computer moves for you and the only thing that you have to do is swing the remote. Now, the computer is really good at moving my character where I want to go, so it's not like I'm complaining that it's doing a bad job of that or something. It's more the other way around--the computer is too good at moving the Miis around, and when I'm trying to score against my human friends, it can be pretty difficult. They could have (more) easily made the game utilize the nunchuck and used the analog stick to move your character. This would have made me tickled. This is also related to one of my problems with the game, though. Characters in the game move faster than light. You can hit the ball to the far right side of the court, then hit it to the complete opposite end with a powerful stroke, and the back player can hit both with ease. This makes scoring extremely difficult and can make points last way longer than they should.

Like I explained earlier, the only thing you have to do in this game is swing the remote like you would a real racket. I hear there are over 100 different shots based on how you swing the remote, which sounds pretty good, and it is. I was pretty impressed with how the shots handled. Some I didn't like, but it was very consistent. For example, to hit a fast ball you have to flick the remote a certain way. I wouldn't normally do this at all so when I want to hit it fast it seems awkward. However, every time you swing like this it has the same results, so that's all that really matters to me. You can perform lob shots (high and slow), drop shots (close to the net), hard shots, and slow shots. This sounds nice and dandy until you get on the court. The only shot you'll ever really use is the fast stroke. If you hit it slow they will run to the ball and hit it every time. Lob shots are pointless because they'll always hit the ball, same with a drop shot (which can also be hard to perform). Even when you're hitting the ball as fast as you can, the opponents will still run down the ball nearly every time.

In order to aim a shot, you have to time it just right. On the forehand for right handers(when you hold the remote in your right hand on your right side) if you hit the ball early, the ball will go to the left. If you hit the ball late, it will go to the right. On a backhand shot for right handers, flip it: an early shot results in the ball going to the right, and a late shot results in the ball going left. The timing is not very forgiving, and in order to score (since the other characters run so incredibly fast) you'll have to go from one extreme to the other. In other words, you'll have to hit it all the way to the left or right that you can, and then all the way to the opposite direction. Anywhere not to the extreme and they'll hit the ball. This means that you run the risk of hitting the ball out of bounds, or even swinging to early or late and missing the ball completely. In other words, in order to try to score on your Olympic-speed running opponents, you'll probably end up hitting it out of bounds or missing it completely. The timing can be pretty rough, and it's the reason that my playing time for this sport sharply decreased after I started playing much better computer AI.

Another thing that bothered me about this sport was that the AI controlled players at the net hit the ball about 2% (completely made up figure) of the time it seems. I realized that when I was playing the computer that I should just completely ignore the front person and concentrate on setting up the back player to score. That strategy seemed to work well considering how often (or rather, rare) the character at the net hits the ball (he must be really unselfish). When you're using a computer on your team, it's the same way--he'll never go after the ball at the net. It wasn't for quite awhile that I realized one Wii remote can actually control two tennis players. Since the only thing you have to do to control the Miis is swing, you can control two at once! The computer moves them around for you, and when you swing, they'll both swing. Whoever is at the ball will hit the ball (or if neither is by it you'll both just swoosh the air around, of course). This is nice since you don't have to put up with your crappy AI partner who only hits it once every five minutes, and when he does hit it, he hits it out of bounds to give the other team a break point! Or something like that.

You can also put spin on the ball when you hit it, but honestly, I haven't figured out how. Occasionally some of my shots will have some funky spin on it. I've looked around online to see if it's flicking your wrist before the shot or some such, and I haven't had any luck finding a definitive way to master spin in the game. It's a shame too, I could really use some more techniques to beat some of those computer players.

Baseball- Nintendo took an interesting approach to this sport. Instead of regular baseball rules, "Indian" rules are implemented (I think that's what they're called, I don't play, watch, or like real baseball). Meaning, if you hit the ball into the infield, and the opposing team stops the ball without juggling it, you're out. It doesn't matter if it's a grounder and they don't throw it to a base to tag the runner, you're just out. Likewise, if you hit it into the outfield and they don't catch the ball, you can get a double, or sometimes a triple if they miss it pretty badly. And of course, over the fence is a home run. This usually just ends up as a home run derby, and there isn't much to control since the computer moves all the characters on the field. In fact, the only thing you can do in this game is swing the bat if you're batting, and pitch the ball if you aren't. Also, unlike bowling, golf, and tennis, only two people can play this game at a time.

I found batting to be extremely difficult. Maybe my timing is just horrible, however, because some of my friends had an easier time with it (then again, some were worse *wince*). If you're up against a decent pitcher, good luck. The problem I found is that it's really hard to know which pitches to swing against. If they throw a ball to you, just like in real life, you have a split second to tell if you're going to swing the remote or not. If you stall, you'll probably swing too late and foul the ball off or miss completely. Since you want to avoid that, you'll probably settle for just swinging at pretty much any pitch. This is okay against poor skilled AI opponents, but for humans that know what they're doing.. you'll have a tough time against them. I ended up not playing this particular sport very much since I just couldn't get the hang of the batting. Some of my friends really enjoyed this one, though, so I suppose if you get good at it, the sport will be much more fun.

Pitching was pretty fun, however. You can throw three different kinds of pitches: fastball, curve ball, and a fastball. It's really easy to throw different pitches, too. One pitch is the A button, another is the B trigger, and the third is holding both. The speed of the pitch depends on how you swing the Wii remote. Although, I did find that it wasn't necessarily the harder you swing the remote, the faster the game would pitch the ball. Sometimes a slow swing could render a lightning quick fastball. So I'm guessing that the angle of the swing matters somewhat, as well, but I don't know for sure.

Baseball is limited to three innings, and can be over pretty quick if you get a bunch of strikeouts. Since this is the only type of game you can play (no regular rulings), and you can only play three innings at a time, the baseball sport leaves something to be desired. They could have easily included different sets of rules and let the player run with the nunchuck. However, this sport is still fairly entertaining with a group of friends.

Boxing- After playing this game for a few minutes, it is pretty clear that this is the least polished of all the sports games. This is the only Wii Sports game that utilizes both the Wii remote and its nunchuck together. As you might have guessed, you hold the Wii remote in the right hand and the nunchuck in the left (or vice versa for lefties), holding them up in front of your face like a boxer would. There are a few different kinds of punches you can do: high, low, uppercut, possibly others. You can also move your body around by moving both the remote and the nunchuck left, right, or center depending on where you want to move your body in order to miss incoming punches. After playing one match with a friend of mine, one thing was apparent: this game is a work out. We were both constantly punching and punching (admittedly, not even close to all of our punches were registering) and it was quite tiresome. I'm sure there is some kind of strategy to use, but I never really found one--I didn't find the game nearly as fun as the others and rarely played it. It seemed to me that there was a lot less skill in this particular sport than the others, and I like to play games that I have more control over (in this case, bowling and tennis). Still, if boxing is your pleasure, you could probably have a lot of fun with this game. Since you are actually punching with the remote and nunchuck, it should seem pretty realistic and should be fairly easy to get immersed into. Personally, this just wasn't my cup of tea.

So those are the sports included in the game. After playing each game (whether it be against your friends or the computer AI) you'll receive (or be penalized) skill points depending on how well you did. For instance, if you bowl a good game, your Mii will gain skill points in the bowling sport (but not any of the others). Any Miis that you create can save skill points, but you can't save skill points on guest characters. Once your Mii reaches 1000 skill points (on a scale of 2000), he goes pro. In bowling this means getting a new bowling ball, which I believe is able to spin better than the previous ball. But if not, the ball looks cooler. In boxing, you can get new gloves. In the other sports, nothing really happens when you get the pro rank, unfortunately. This is quite a disappointment, since they could have done some cool things in this respect.

There is also a training mode in the game. The first time you do the training mode, it will guess your age (the better you do, the lower the age). You can do this once per day, and each time as you improve, your age will go further and further down until it hits (I think) 25, which is the ideal fitness age. The training includes all of the sports, and has you do different tasks with each to test how good you are at the sport. This is nice, but I forgot about it since you can only do it once per day.

The graphics in the game are quite controversial. Comparing them to XBOX 360 or PS3 graphics probably is unfair, however, it's still an issue. The visuals look pretty pathetic. The Miis are part of the problem. They're just really childish and unreal looking. However, despite this, I'll pull out the cliche card and say that the graphics really don't matter that much at all. I really would have liked better graphics, even just slightly better would have been nice. In the end, though, it's not the graphics that make a game great. I still have to review them and dock points if they are not using the Wii's potential, however, and they are sadly not. Thankfully for the future, this was a launch title, and I'm looking forward to similar games with better graphics that aren't rushed to make a certain date.

This is a game that was meant to be played multiplayer, though. It just isn't as fun by yourself. I played by myself for awhile and got fairly good at the games, then playing with my friends was fun because I could show them how to play each game and give them tips. If you don't have multiple Wii remotes, you can pass one remote around to all the different players. I found having two remotes was satisfactory when playing with four people: two people shared one remote and there was no hindrance. There is one glaring mistake that Nintendo made, however. There is no online play. I can't fathom how Nintendo could do this on a game that is fully geared towards multiplayer except that the Wii's online scheme wasn't ready by Christmas time and they really wanted to bundle Wii Sports with the console to boost sales. Just because I understand why they didn't include this obvious aspect in the game doesn't mean I think it was a good move. I probably would've given this game an 8 or so if it included online play, since that just adds so much to a game (let's face it, playing against the same friends over and over can get old fast.. especially if your friends smell, not that mine do, but yours might).

Don't be surprised by my "low" ranking as some people would say and think that this is a bad game. 6 is above average, meaning, it's better than the average Joe game. Frankly, this game was just too simple to give it a much higher ranking. There was nothing to do with it after a little bit of play. Getting a pro ranking is nice, but when there is nothing to gain from doing so, it makes me not want to as much. Almost all the games suffered from a lack of things to do. There was only one course for golf, one type of game for baseball, no record keeping on anything besides the low score on golf (it's pretty upsetting when you get a hole in one and there's no proof of it anywhere on the game). There just simply isn't anything to do or beat. That said, playing with your friends gives you a new set of opponents to beat and something to accomplish in the game. I actually played the game a lot, so I can't say that there isn't anything to do. But almost all of my play was multiplayer. If you don't have anyone to play this with, you'll probably get bored of it quickly. If Nintendo stops bundling this with the Wii, it would definitely be worth your money to buy a copy if you have friends to play with (and since everyone now has one, they would be cheap to buy). If you don't plan on playing with anyone else, you might want to hold off with it. I was pleased with the game just because of the multiplayer. It was a good game, and for the game to be bundled with a new console, I'm not complaining about it at all. The game does have its flaws, though, but most are over-ridden when you forget about them and play the game for what it is: an addictive and innovative, multiplayer launch title.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 01/08/07