Review: Wii Sports
On the day our precious Wii consoles arrived here at GamePro, most editors ripped into Zelda like ravenous, toothless maniacs. But unable to escape my jock-ish roots, I booted up our second Wii, far from the magical echoes of Link and his latest journey, and launched Wii Sports.
For more on Wii Sports check out our extensive Video Review.
Like a little-leaguer waiting anxiously on deck, I jumped right into baseball and starting swinging away. It was good, very responsive, and for the first time in quite a while, I felt as if I was having an inherently fun gaming experience. There were no lengthy tutorials to watch, no boring cinemas to wait out, and certainly no out-of-place rap music booming the background.
Simple and Effective
PROTIP: Does your ball keep curving into the gutter when you bowl? Reposition your character to compensate.
Wii Sports' simplicity is a two-way street, and the instant gratification of Wii Sports is bound to wear off eventually, right? Not exactly. It's hard to discount a free game based on its replay value because, well, it's free. Wii Sports is a great example of what the Wii can do and how Nintendo first-party development can package a great deal of gameplay in an unassuming package.
But alas, the avid sports gamer will find each game on Wii Sports rather shallow, offering much less depth that the standard console sports game. It is a game you'll want to pick up and play every so often, and is more fun in groups of people than alone.
The Sports
There is no setup or calibration involved with Wii Sports. Once you load up the game and select a sport, you can pretty much jump right into the action. There are five playable sports in the game: baseball, tennis, golf, bowling, and boxing. (Boxing is the only game that uses the additional nunchuck attachment.) Each game has a short tutorial that plays when it starts, showing you the basic actions required to play. Most of the actions are obvious and straightforward, while some are a little more complicated.
You can chuck the ball as hard as you can when pitching, but don't let go of the wiimote!
In baseball, for instance, swinging works just like swinging a real bat, and the sensor even recognizes waggling and practice swings. Pitching can get more involved, if you want it to be. You could easily throw straight fastballs by flicking the Wii remote, but holding different directional-pad buttons changes pitch locations and can be used in combination with other buttons to throw curveballs, screwballs, and splitters. Games in baseball are three-innings long and there's no user-controlled fielding. Instead, it is played in an over-the-line fashion, where hitting out of the infield is a single, in the gaps is a double, and so forth. Out of the five games, I found baseball the most fun; it is extremely responsive and is the most physical game of the bunch.
Tennis is similar to baseball in that all it really requires is a swinging motion. The sensor recognizes forehands, backhands, overhead smashes, and even changes shot trajectory depending on how much the remote is tilted. Unfortunately, it's doubles play only and there's nothing much else to do.
Golf has arguably the most content and is the best looking game of the group, but it's mechanics are the hardest to use. The problem here is that the sensor bar recognizes your upswing and follow-through as the same. This means that the power of a shot can be gauged by the follow-through of your swing, when it should only be a factor of the upswing. Minor details yes, but as a golfer, I always follow through each shot the same way, but in Wii Sports golf, this will almost always result in an overly powerful shot.
The bar on the left tells you how much power was in your swing.
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