Regardless of personal tastes or preferences, there's one game that
everyone who picks up the Nintendo Wii at launch in the US will get, and
that's Wii Sports. This is the game that Nintendo has chosen to include with
its new hardware, and it makes for a pretty smart package. It's a collection
of simple games based on the sports of tennis, baseball, bowling, golf, and
boxing. It can admittedly be a little short on depth at times, so those
looking for stunningly realistic renditions of these sports will need to
look elsewhere. Wii Sports uses common, relatable activities to provide an
example of how to create a tactile experience on the Wii. To this end, it's
quite successful.
What immediately makes Wii Sports attractive is its ease of use. Each of
the games shaves its respective sport down to a few essential elements and
then has you pantomiming these basic activities with the Wii Remote--and in
the case of boxing, the Nunchuk as well. For tennis, all you'll be doing is
swinging the Remote as though it were a tennis racket. At the start of the
match you'll flick the remote up to toss the ball in the air, and then with
a quick swing you'll serve the ball. Depending on your handedness, swinging
to the right or to the left will produce a forehand or backhand swing, while
the game itself will move your player about the court. It generally does a
good job of putting you in front of the ball, allowing you to focus entirely
on your return, something that's determined by the shape and speed of your
swing. You won't have pro-level, laserlike accuracy, and your timing governs
most of your directional control. It's ideally either a two- or four-player
game, though the artificial intelligence can facilitate a decent doubles
game if you're on your own. You can choose from a one-off game, best of
three, or best of five, and that's about it for tennis.
Baseball is reduced to batting and pitching, with all of the fielding
handled on your behalf by the game. The motions are pretty analogous to the
real thing, so you'll hold and swing the remote as though it were a baseball
bat. You'll see your batter waving the bat over his shoulder as you do the
same with the remote, but you don't need to worry about your strike zone,
just the timing and speed at which you swing. There's a little more to
pitching, which relies on an over-the-shoulder, down-and-forward motion to
emulate your standard big-league overhand pitch, and the speed of this
gesture will determine the speed of your pitch. You can add a little mustard
by holding the A button to produce a curveball, the B button for a
screwball, or both for a splitter. You can affect the direction of the ball
using the D pad before your pitch, though the game doesn't give great
feedback as to how high, low, inside, or out the pitch will be. Again, it's
a better experience with two players, but it's still pretty good against the
AI. It's most fun in short bursts, so the fact that the games are limited to
three innings seems like a good thing.
Bowling is perhaps the most nuanced of the games included in Wii Sports
and generally comes across as the most intact sport of the five, with just
the right amount of technicality. You'll start off holding the remote in
front of you pointing straight up, then you'll move it down, back, and
forward again. You'll hold the B button as you swing, and when you let go,
your player will release the ball. Like with a real bowling ball, any twist
in your wrist as you swing will give your ball some spin. And, like with a
real bowling ball, you can counteract spin by moving your player's starting
position to the left or right, as well as your angle of attack, before you
throw. Up to four players can play a full 10 frames here, and the fact that
your success isn't governed by interacting directly with others somehow
makes bowling especially accessible.
The actual sport of golf is one of restraint, which is definitely the
focus of Wii Sports' take on it. Swinging the remote as though it were a
golf club basically emulates the old rising power meter that was once
standard in all golf video games. You'll see an onscreen power meter that
goes higher the harder you swing. There are dots at regular intervals on the
power meter that correspond with the dots on your ball's projected path in
an onscreen minimap so that figuring out how hard you need to swing is
mostly a simple matter of determining which dot you need to swing to. Of
course, you'll have the winds to contend with, and there's the ball's bounce
and roll to be considered as well. While it can be tempting to just grip it
and rip it when you're making your way up the fairway, if you swing so hard
that you go past the top of your power meter, you'll slice or hook the shot.
Putting works similarly, though with a much more subdued motion. As natural
as the swing can feel, it's a little contrived, and you'll see that you can
continue to give the power of an underpowered shot a little bump by
continuing to raise the controller up and forward after the ball has already
left the ground. There are only nine different holes of golf, which start
off as straight shots and dog-legs and end with an interesting hole that
spans a small archipelago. We found the swing to be a little fussy at times,
but not so much that we didn't wish there were more holes to play through.
Boxing is the only Wii Sports game that uses the Nunchuk attachment.
You'll control your fighter's stance, blocking, and punches by holding the
remote and the Nunchuk and moving them accordingly. Holding them right in
front of you will block, and you can also dodge punches by swaying forward,
back, and side-to-side. Boxing can be the most physically exhausting game of
the five, since swinging your fists causes your fighter to do the same.
You'll need to aim high and low with your actual swings if you want to hit
your opponent specifically in the head or body. Since only the Wii Remote
interacts directly with the movements onscreen, the position of your off
hand is at least loosely tied to it, making it difficult to distract your
opponent with an uppercut with one hand while you try to sneak in a body
blow with the other. The game goes split-screen when you're up against a
live opponent, and matches seem to always end in a knockout, so you don't
need to sweat the judges.
Despite their relative simplicity, there's still a learning curve to the
games in Wii Sports, and a training mode is included that not only serves to
help you hone your skills, but can be a fun challenge for those who've
already got a handle on the games. There are three different activities for
each sport, and they focus further on specific aspects of the game. For
example, in tennis you'll be challenged to return as many consecutive,
relentless serves as you can without missing. Baseball has you competing in
a home run derby. Bowling has you working on using spin to your advantage by
placing barriers strategically in the lane. Golf will challenge you to make
it to the green in a single shot from a variety of positions. Boxing tests
your power against a series of punching bags that you need to knock clean
off their chains.
It's in the training mode, though, that you'll probably discover that you
don't need to perform big, sweeping motions in a few of the games to play
well, which is too bad, since it seems a little counter to the notion of the
package. Another way Wii Sports keeps you coming back is with a daily
fitness test. Here you'll participate in a random series of training mode
challenges, and based on your performance you'll be assigned a fitness age,
a none-too-subtle nod to the Brain Age test in Nintendo's DS puzzle game of
the same name. It worked in Brain Age, and it seems to work well in Wii
Sports, too.
Wii Sports is the first Wii game that uses the Mii, a digital avatar that
you can create and customize from the console's Wii Channel interface. These
figures, which look a bit like further simplified versions of Playmobil
people, populate Wii Sports, and they set the tone for the look of the game.
The environments aren't as overtly abstracted, but their look is simple and
clean, something that comes across on both standard and progressive scan
displays. The sound follows suit with simple, crisp effects, and though it's
perhaps not as striking, it does make nice, mostly underplayed use of the
Wii Remote's speaker.
The first time the games included in Wii Sports were shown to the public,
it was simply as tech demos to prove that Nintendo wasn't totally crazy for
building a whole console around motion-sensitive controls. Though there's
still kind of a tech-demo feel to Wii Sports, it's a fun, unique package
you'll enjoy so long as you don't expect too much detail from it.
