wii sports (*)
a review of
wii sports
a videogame by nintendo
published by nintendo
for the nintendo wii
text by tim rogers
score: 
(out of four)
I’ve checked my Wii Weather Channel twice today, and tomorrow’s forecast hasn’t changed: it’s going to be “Manic”, with a slight chance of scattered “Normal”; so while I’m still here sitting on “Depressive”, let’s do the unthinkable, and talk about how much I dislike — or even, possibly, hate — Wii Sports.
First, though, a disclaimer: do you realize how fucking long it took me to get my Wii online? If you said “almost six months” (or even “almost half a year”), then you’re absolutely right. Well, that’s not to say that I was trying for the whole time. Just that I bought the Wii, brought it home, groaned at the fact that it can’t display high-definition resolutions yet is compatible only to wireless internet connections — which seemed even more backward in reality than it did on paper — and then just let it sit there, unconnected to the rich, honey-dripping goodness of the internet, for nearly half a year. I checked the Virtual Console page on Nintendo’s website every couple weeks, wondering if anything was coming out that I wanted. And then, just two days ago, I got around to configuring my Macbook Pro to share my internet connection wirelessly, and after entering IP addresses and such into the Wii, it now triumphantly works online. There are still no Virtual Console games I would like to play that I don’t already own the original versions of.
I wonder if there’s some psychological equivalent of the IP address entry procedure that I need to complete before I can like Wii Sports. If anything, I’m confident that I don’t enjoy Wii Sports because it’s not for me — it’s for people who either haven’t ever played videogames or people who were old enough to purchase marijuana back when Pong was brand-spanking new, people who gave up on the videogame fad back when no top analyst was capable of believably making the prediction that someday game characters would start to look less like solid white lines and more like people. In Wii Sports, players frantically wave a Wii remote around in order to make their on-screen avatar, a puppet-like human being who may or may not resemble the player or one of the player’s loved (or hated) ones, perform various sports-like tasks. The game opens with three or four steel-handed disclaimers: secure the Wii remote strap tightly around your wrist, be careful not to hit anyone as you swing your arms, don’t wake the neighbors with your triumphant cries of “fuck yeah”, et cetera. Though in this reviewer’s humble opinion, most of it isn’t really necessary. You don’t even need to stand up and look like a jerk-ass, like the people on the back of the box, to play this game. You can just sit on the sofa twiddling your wrists. If you don’t believe me, check The Internet. I do believe this phenomenon has been reported in other places.
Here at Action Button Dot Net, we play-test all games we review using a large enough high-definition television situated in the cockpit of a grounded F-14 Tomcat fighter jet, and even within these cramped confines we were able to bowl strikes in Wii Sports Bowling, or punch out our molasses-slow would-be adversaries in Wii Sports Boxing. We were even able to hit a homerun in Wii Sports Baseball. It’s really not that difficult to play and succeed at this game without growing a horrifying hairstyle and/or hiding under the sofa and/or flashing a smile so artificially white as to blind the Wii sensor bar atop your television.
When the Wii’s dynamic and interesting remote control was introduced to the public, some keen observers were quick to note that tilt sensitivity had been something that people wanted, perhaps subconsciously: remember your little sister playing Super Mario Bros. forever ago, yanking the controller up above shoulder level every time Mario jumped. You thought nothing of it, back then, and neither did she. And perhaps Nintendo themselves were thinking nothing of it when they created the Wii remote — from the start, their only intent had been to make a “new” controller, for “new” playing “experiences”, and the final design was probably just about as good as they were going to get. I mean, one of the other prototypes showed a “Hungry Hungry Hippos”-looking plastic toy platform with one giant button in the middle, for Peach’s sake.
Sure, tilt sensitivity is pretty awesome. I’ve played a couple demos of Wii games that felt tight and polished and sublimely enjoyable — Dragon Quest Swords, for example — though Wii Sports just, quite frankly, ain’t the future. It’s cheap and tiny; it’s not a rock star dreaming big dreams, it’s the manager of a twenty-four hour supermarket. It’s sold nearly 2 million copies in Japan to date, and it wasn’t released in America for more than two weeks before somebody wrote a letter to Kotaku about how the game had helped them lose something like fourteen pounds, and how they think they could be a spokesperson for Nintendo, the way Jared was for Subway sandwiches. Wii Sports is the weirdest kind of euphoria-exploitation, and it kind of chills me. It’s a little cheap parlor trick, a toy. I went into my Large Japanese Videogame Corporation after the New Years’ holiday had ended, and just about threw up in my mouth when a person I really respected beamed about how much they’d enjoyed playing Wii Sports with their family every night for literally eight days in a row. I asked this person if they’d not found the game kind of cheap and dull, and they replied, “Well, yeah. It was nice to see everyone else in my family having fun, though.”
Tilt sensitivity is a pretty awesome thing, as I’ve said in the above paragraph. I still think that. And I’m pretty dead convinced that Wii Sports doesn’t use it very well. The game that blew the doors off the DS, for example, was Nintendo’s Brain Age — a game about answering simple mathematical problems as per an actual doctor’s recommendation, in the interest of staving off Alzheimer’s disease. Compare this to the over-eager Nintendo DS playable demos shown behind closed doors at that year’s E3: Sega had shown a Sonic the Hedgehog demo with blocky 32-bit polygon graphics and no gameplay aside from the ability to make Sonic run faster and faster by scraping the bottom screen with the stylus. Wii Sports is to that Sonic demo as Dragon Quest Swords is to Brain Training, if you ask me. However, Dragon Quest Swords most likely does not present the “evergreen” quality to sell nearly as many copies to nearly as many consumers of nearly as many age groups as Brain Training.
This review then serves two purposes: Firstly, I’m being optimistic that, despite its great sales numbers, Wii Sports has not blown the doors off the Nintendo Wii. No, the door-blower-offer is still hidden somewhere shadowy, and it’s not Super Mario Galaxy, tear-jerkingly amazing as that game will likely be.
Secondly, I’m going to be pessimistic, though more about myself than about videogames: I’m just a guy writing a review on the internet, and not one of Nintendo’s marketing geniuses, so I can’t fathom what game will ultimately redeem the Nintendo Wii. If I worked for Nintendo, I’d probably make sure that their consoles had LAN ports, because even some people who own HDTVs don’t have wireless routers (ahem!), or else I’d insist on a minimum maximum resolution of 720p for all games, or maybe I’d bring a riding crop to board meetings and slap bald heads en masse until they agreed that rechargeable battery packs and a controller charging cradle were pack-in necessities for their system. (Seriously, I’ve changed the batteries in my Wii remotes like six times now, and I’ve barely played anything on it.) Though you know what? Einstein apparently failed basic math in high school, and needed to ask his friend to do his income taxes for him; piano virtuosos throughout the centuries have tripped on their untied shoelaces while shuffling out for an encore time and time again. As Nintendo is currently the golden boy of pioneering game innovation, we, the loving parents of adorable little Miis and proud owners of Nintendo Wiis and sweat-proof rubber Wiimote covers, might behold Nintendo’s little missteps — the vapidity of Wii Sports, the bleating shamelessness of Nintendo of America’s neanderthal president (seriously, this is business, not wrestling; or: seriously, the guy used to work at Pizza Hut; or: seriously, “Blue Ocean” means you’re not “fighting” anyone; “doing our own thing” means you don’t have to worry about laying “smack-downs” on your rivals — because you should be busy doing your “own thing”) — as dribbles of spittle coagulating at the corner of an idiot savant’s mouth. One day before he masturbates himself to death at the mercy of an issue of Dog Fancy, this unkempt little bastard is going to invent the Ultimate Toothbrushing Solution, which will prevent cavities and kill plaque and tartar in all peace-loving people after just one dose.
We here at Action Button Dot Net have been under fire, recently — before the official launch of our website, in fact — for writing reviews that accentuate the negative things in videogames, while applauding none of their strengths. A comment on one review bemoaned it for being “off-topic” and “rambling”; I think I replied to that comment personally, with a link to IGN and a well-wishing: “Have fun dying alone!” To wit: I’m sure that kid didn’t give a fuck about the game I was reviewing, and neither did I. The goal of this website, as it were, is not to be the “Best source for reviews, previews, screenshots, and news regarding [GAME TITLE]” — it is to use reviews as tools for provoking discussion on videogames. That is to say, if you want a “review” of Wii Sports that tells you everything you need to know about the game, look somewhere else. I merely felt compelled to write something about the game, and didn’t arrive at any other conclusion than this sad realization: “This game is not for me. It’s not for me because I’ve played too many videogames, and seen what they can do.” If the game were a gateway drug pointing the way to a lifetime of substance abuse, it’d probably be Pixy Stix.
Let’s get critical for just a moment, though: the graphics kind of do suck. I’m not saying that I hate the way the Mii characters look, because hey, artistic expression and whatnot. Instead, I’ll say that the colors are washed out and acutely drab. The music is bouncy samba-pop trash. And, to reiterate, the gameplay is vapid and weirdly self-important. For example, in Wii Sports Tennis, where your onscreen avatar moves entirely on his or her own, all you can control is the swinging of the racket — of course, done by shaking the remote. You can do backhands or forehands, apparently, and you can (kind of) control the strength of your swing. I’ve pored over it for over five hours, however, and still don’t quite find the execution delicate enough to laud as triumphant. I can play the game seated on my sofa with a hand on my crotch, and still not lose. So why does the game split the screen when you’re playing with two or more players? The immediate answer is “So each player can see the game from his own perspective, and choose between backhand and forehand effectively.” I get really touchy when games split the screen, especially when they don’t have to. To test myself, I watched my avatar only as represented at the top of my friend’s side of the screen. I had no problem whatsoever differentiating between backhand and forehand. Do normal people not possess the spatial perception to backhand effectively without the screen being split? “No, they don’t,” quipped my friend. How about you? I asked him. I told him to look at my screen instead of his. He won the point. “I guess I can, though.” To be as blunt as possible, I feel a greater sense of intricate challenge when I grab the world globe on my Wii News Channel, and spin it with all my might, and try to grab and stop it on the exact point where I started. (In all honesty, that’s become a great and precious hobby these past twenty-four hours.)
In a way, Wii Sports makes me feel awesome for being able to do something Nintendo’s play-testers apparently thought most people can’t do. In another way, it makes me kind of cringe, because it’s so cheap and tacky that it’s not entirely adorable. Tennis is always doubles, which is kind of hokey, even if you’re just playing two players. When I swing my remote, both players on my team swing their rackets in unison, which is even hokier. It’s enough to make me imagine, for a second, a world where Konami ditches the excellent Winning Eleven series to instead focus on foosball table simulators; where games like Bandai-Namco’s Magic Taizen card-trick-trainer for Nintendo DS are actually popular — that fucking game includes a deck of cards in its box, so you can test the card tricks out on your friends. I say, don’t ask videogames to do what other things can do for you — if you want to learn card tricks, read a book about card tricks. If you want to play foosball, buy a foosball table. Certainly, Wii Sports stands head and shoulders above these two examples, though mostly only because it managed to fulfill its promise without even, you know, making a promise to begin with: it got people together, it got grandma to peel her eyes off her handheld Casio TV and the soap operas within, it got the goth sons and vegan daughters to come out of the basements and garages and enjoy Thanksgiving dinner like they’ll probably never enjoy Thanksgiving dinner again. Each sale of the game represents a flash-in-the-pan holiday for one someone somewhere; it is with sadness that I say that my first experience with the game was not such a monumental occasion, and therefore I can score it no higher than one star. If you disagree with this review, congratulations: you’re far more likely to marry your high school sweetheart than I. I didn’t even have a high school sweetheart, come to think of it — I was a borderline sociopath who spent six hours a night writing letters under dozens of pseudonyms to DIE HARD GAME FAN instead of sleeping, for God’s sake.
And . . . now I’ve said a bit too much.
(thanks to benjamin rivers for the exclusive Action Button Dot Net screenshot of Wii Sports. do NOT reuse without our permission or we will proceed to take legal action. lol no just kidding man use it all you want.)
May 30th, 2007 at 1026
Knocking a game because of it’s advertising campaign is lame.
Also, you’re a toolbox.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/11/13
Otherwise, great… should we call them reviews anymore? Great discussion? Enjoyable read, anyway.
May 30th, 2007 at 1043
innovation
here’s a secret tip to guarantee a strike every time in bowling:
swing the wiimote back and hold the button then throw it forward and let go of the button but do it at the right time and you’ll get a strike
wii sports is kind of like stacking computer paper in a white room with a radio nearby that has its front on the floor
it was kinda fun at first
bowling, i mean
May 30th, 2007 at 1144
I am always looking forward to the next review on this site.
Even if I don’t agree with everything I always enjoy the way it’s written.
May 30th, 2007 at 1500
Diplo – sure, you could do that, but – relative quality of Wii Sports aside – trying to break these games (as opposed to trying to break any other games) seems to me to be completely missing the point. Maybe that validates this review! I wouldn’t say so, however many good points it made. But you’re definitely supposed to pretend to be bowling, at least.
May 30th, 2007 at 1916
well, yeah. whenever i did play with people, we mostly did everything honestly. still, the exploitation is available, and it’s a bit funny to see in action.
May 30th, 2007 at 1949
A review of Pong that focused solely on the the lack of depth in its central mechanic — ignoring the game’s contributions to culture — would be a ridiculous read.
This review does similar injustice to Wii Sports. It’s fair to say that the graphics suck, that its mechanics are shallow and easily exploitable, and that it’s not for you. It’s fair to give it a single-star rating. But it’s not fair to write off the game’s tremendous push into the mainstream — its unprecedented ability to get grandma to pick up the controller. Wii Sports is important. It won’t go down in history because its an example of great game design (there’s no doubt that its appeal hinges on the motion-sensor gimmick) but because it made gaming accessible and desirable to the rest of your family.
If Action Button aspires to be something greater than a Consumer Reports for videogames, it needs to consider these issues! The play experience is important, but it doesn’t wholly define a game.
May 30th, 2007 at 2004
To amend my previous comment:
I don’t mean to imply that I didn’t think you considered these issues in your review. I should have written, “If Action Button aspires to be something greater than a Consumer Reports for videogames, it needs to consider these issues *to be important and worthy of discussion*.”
Your comment about grandma and her disaffected grandkids getting together to play Wii Sports was funny, but you’re scornful of the game’s ability to attract non-gamers. But isn’t that ability fascinating and worthy of discussion?
May 30th, 2007 at 2058
Discussion! Hi-Ho!
I thought Wii Sports was pretty amusing; for its vapid cheapness as much as for the fun times to be had in it.
I can’t say I liked it much… it took about two minutes for me to “beat” every ‘sport’ within it, but I kept playing for another hour or so. Why? Because I had someone to play with. The game flogs itself with all these faults, seemingly, all for the sake of a convenient simplicity that attracts anyone and everyone to play together for a little while.
Perhaps the saddest thing in all of it is that I still think it’s the best ‘game’ there is for the Wii.
Oh wait right Trauma Center nevermind.
May 30th, 2007 at 2354
Suggestions for things greater than a Consumer Reports for videogames that Action Button could aspire to become:
A Better Homes and Gardens for particle physics
The OMNI of ultimate fighting championships
A Barely Legal for parasailing
A Guns and Ammo for short wave radio enthusiasts
The Car and Driver of male pattern baldness
The Ebony of stamp collecting
A Rolling Stone for mechanical engineering
The Vanity Fair of cosplay
The New York Review of Books of Norweigen black metal
And I would read them all!
May 31st, 2007 at 306
I am so pleased by all of your comments!
Skjef:
You asked “Should we call them reviews anymore?”
I say, sure, why not? Are IGN’s reviews really “reviews”? They pass judgment, sure, though that judgment always seems so tacked-on. I think we should call them “extended descriptions”, for highest accuracy. ABDN is reviews. Simple enough, yeah?
monster_meal:
What’s going to really bake your noodle later is when you realize that the people writing on this site don’t always agree with what they’re saying.
Mr. Conkling:
First of all, you have a pretty awesome last name. Second of all, I’m not scornful of the fact that this game is raking in non-gamers, I’m just a little . . . wistful, I guess, that it’s not a spectacular game. Non-gamers are, for the most part (compared to hardcore gamers, at least), pretty exceptionally good people. The more non-gamers we have around, the better.
At the launch of the Wii, Wii Sports was the only bullet in the gun Nintendo had aimed right at the heads of the non-gamers. It’s just not a very good bullet. I’m sure grandmas and grandpas enjoyed it, or whatever, though I’m pretty sure that its vapidity sooner or later crept in and everyone was back to not talking to one another.
As I’ve said, I can feel this endless, ridiculous, near-idiot-savant-like potential in the motion controls. They can slay the world with those motion controls. It’s just that I think Wii Sports is a thin little gimmick that might end up doing more harm than good.
To wit: did you know that Parasite Eve was once featured in TIME magazine, months before its release? It was a Japanese videogame with COMPUTER-ANIMATED CUT-SCENES set in NEW YORK CITY!!!! and brimming with HOLLYWOOD PRODUCTION VALUES!!
Yeah, it also didn’t have any fucking voice acting, or a plot that a glue-drinking second-grader couldn’t write in his NyQuil-Kids-fueled sleep.
There were many people, back then, who were probably willing to take videogames seriously. Someone jumped the gun, though. It wasn’t quite time yet.
It’s getting to be almost time right about now.
Who knows, though.
When the real awesome Wii game comes along, grandpa might remember Wii Sports, let out a “Bahhhh!” and go back to watching “Girls Gone Wild”.
May 31st, 2007 at 630
Re: The no hi-def/wireless only PARADOX. While I also wish the Wii could output in HD, c’mon man, the Wii’s supposed to appeal to the masses. What % of people actually have HDTVs — 10%? Odds are, Cletus Yoakem’s gonna have a $20 wireless router over a $1000 picturebox.
Yes, I’m bitter that I can’t afford a nice(r) TV.
Also, I’ve been a gamer a long time and tend to shy away from all the casual bullshit (save for little Brain Age now and again when I can yank the DS from my girlfriend’s grubby paws). But I must say, when I have buddies over & a couple beers have been cracked, Wii Sports often gets pulled out and good times are had. Maybe the less you play it, the more enjoyable it is. I guess that’s not really a compliment. Oh, and stick to multiplayer.
One more thing: of course you can just sit on your couch and slightly waggle your wrists back and forth with little effort, but where’s the fun in that? Gaming’s always been about using your imagination, so get up and pull a muscle or two trying to put EXTREME spin on your next roll, er, toss, er… throw? What’s the appropriate bowling verb anyway?
May 31st, 2007 at 819
Did you really just quote The Matrix?
May 31st, 2007 at 928
Yes and I should hope that by now we’re above pointing it out every time someone quotes the fucking Matrix. Some people do it because they are unaware that they might actually believe, if it were being discussed a few feet in front of them, that lots of Matrixisms have indeed entered the pop-culture lexicon. Other people, like myself, find such hypotheticals ridiculous, and prefer to occasionally, as you say, “quote The Matrix” every once in a while for reasons that are neither sincere nor insincere. Pointing it out is beyond obvious and below humorous.
In other words, you are not contributing to the revolution, kid.
May 31st, 2007 at 931
georges:
I’d really, honestly like to know where people are getting these magical $20 wireless routers.
In Japan, the cheapest one I could find was about $200. It had a huge “BITORRENT” sticker on the box. I bought it and it didn’t work with OSX, despite it saying it would, on the box. I took it back and got a full refund. Consequently, when I got my first internet bill, there was a paper enclosed in there telling me that USE OF BITORRENT had been DETECTED on my account, and that I might want to make sure someone wasn’t using my account illegally! I might even want to change my password. Oh no!
Also, re: “games are about using your imagination” — I would argue quite the opposite!
Thank you for bringing up the main point I would like to discuss, sir!
May 31st, 2007 at 1010
Oh man! Game Fan magazine was fucking awesome!
May 31st, 2007 at 1246
Man Tim, don’t get all defensive about your Matrix quote! I was just curious! You might even say that I am the lame one, for recognizing it at all!
Let’s talk the serious here.
I think Conkling raised a good point, which you didn’t exactly ignore but instead elided: that, despite however much you or I may not like it, Wii Sports really DID get a small white electronic doohickey in grandma’s hands. You answered, “But it’s a shitty game to start out on, because games can be so much more.” That’s true, but you still haven’t answered the question “How?”, which I think is related.
I think Wii Sports gets grandma off the couch because Wii Sports represents the next evolution of what people like grandma think video games are and should be: toys. Give grandma any real game, a Shadow of the Colossus say, and she’ll believe, if she can even get past the interface, that it is taking itself entirely too seriously. It’s just a videogame – isn’t it supposed to be about passing amusement?
Wii Sports is distasteful because it makes videogames look like air rifle carnival games. Wii Sports is successul because it makes videogames look like air rifle carnival games. That is why it’s so dangerous – it’s not a “revolution” at all. The control scheme is just a medium; as you point out, it’s only as innovative as the game it controls. Put too many Wii Sports on the market, and you’ll actually set the cause of gamers – that is, to get videogames recognized as something from which you can derive legitimately profound experiences – BACK, not forward.
May 31st, 2007 at 1324
OK, $20 for a wireless router may have been a bit of an exaggeration — I didn’t remember how much I paid for mine. Googled it, discovered the D-Link router I have goes for about $40 US.
I think games are indeed about using your imagination. Perhaps less so today compared to the early years of cruder-than-crude visuals, but can you honestly say you’ve never mentally (and most likely subconsciously) built upon what you see on the screen, thereby further immersing yourself in it? Karnov wouldn’t still be with me today had I only taken his awesomeness at face value.
By the way, I’m a newcomer here, and I just wanna say it’s great to finally read game reviews with actual balls. IGNSpot reviews never leave me with anything to think about. Kudos!
May 31st, 2007 at 1557
I view wireless routers as being much more common tech than HD sets, seeing as how one sets you back 40$ and the other at least 800.
June 1st, 2007 at 1430
One can knock Wii Sports for being predominantly a shallow exercise (no pun intended) at gameplay mechanic exploitation, but I’m curious whether you actually got far enough to turn “Pro” in any of the sports. At that level, I’ve found baseball to be challenging as hell, and it’s rather hard to keep Pro status in bowling, too.
Yes, anybody can hit a homerun or get a strike, but doing so consistently, to turn on a 104mph fastball OR 63mph screwball against a sidearming lefty, or get strikes on at least 7 frames, including the 10th, and pick up spares on the rest, is challenging enough to this previous Wii-hater that I will freely admit to thinking that Nintendo did a very good job with Wii Sports. I remember, as a child, putting up with all sorts of bullshit mechanics in timing-based games that I never enjoyed but practically described every non-turn-based console game. At least with baseball and bowling (and maybe golf), Wii Sports doesn’t need to do that, and it is satisfying. Maybe the difference is that I don’t need a game that presents gameplay in the abstract to legitimize the experience?
As for what I think about motion sensitivity in games, I will just say: WarioWare: Smooth Moves.
June 2nd, 2007 at 938
Best wireless router for Mac OS X is, oddly enough, their gimpy low-end model, the “AirPort Express”, which can get gotten for the lowlow price of $79 at Apple’s new online “Outlet” store here.
Why is it better than the $250 brand-new shiny wireless-N model? Because this model lets you play all the music on your laptop on your stereo, which is for my money, the best way to listen to music period. Seriously, it’s the best, you should tooooootally get one. ~Jeff
June 2nd, 2007 at 1209
You’re completely missing the point of Wii Sports. Apparently you’re in Japan. Apparently in Japan, judging from the box art at the top, Wii Sports is sold seperately? Here in the states, the game comes with every Wii. Its whole purpose is as a demo and orientation disc. It wets the appetite and helps to familiarize everyone with the console. If they made any of the games too good or realistic, they’d be shooting themselves in the foot for several reasons. First of all, it’s Nintendo. Nintendo doesn’t make sports games. EA makes sports games. Nintendo makes Nintendo games of which Wii Sports is a classic example. The characters–with what you call washed out colors, nevermind that if they were brighter you would probably complain of their tawdry look–are cute and stylized and help demo the whole Mii concept. As for the gameplay being too simplistic may I refer you to a wonderful little PSX title called R/C Stunt Copter.
I think maybe me and 10 other people ever played this game. You know why? Because it was fucking hard as hell. It was brilliant, but way too hard. The control scheme was setup to use both analogs exactly as you would a real R/C copter and if I recall correctly, they playtested it with a group of real R/C copter owners and got all their approval. This game came out at a time when dual analog was still a new thing. Nobody was circle-strafing in Halo. Few games even used both analogs, Ape Escape and little else comes to mind, and people were pretty green with the concept. Myself I loved the game, but I never got very good at it either. I’m sure it frustrated the hell out of anyone who tried it, and there you’ve gone and alienated your audience. Bad idea, and it would have been pure cyanide for Nintendo’s new system if grandma could bowl nothing but gutterballs and had Pete Sampras running around on the court powerslammin’ her Depends off.
What did you want, a complete sports package? That sure wouldn’t encourage third party developers much to have every game that comes out after be overshadowed by the juggernaut of Wii Sports. If you give the customer baseball, boxing, tennis, and bowling with all the wonderful little nuances the control scheme can and I believe will bring to those experiences, there would be less reason develop individual games of those sports. As it stands, new games can come out and blow the doors off this little game. It will fade into the background and take its place next to the other classic video game memories.
People have a fondness for games like Duck Hunt, but that doesn’t stop them from enjoying the likes of Time Crisis. Duck Hunt didn’t put them off to the whole gun game concept, far from it. It’s a simple game. It wasn’t meant to completely define its genre, it was an introduction to the unfamiliar. Later gun games came along, many in the arcades and some on home consoles, and they carved out a piece of the genre for themselves. Now gun games are understood and can be picked up easily, as will happen eventually with Nintendo’s motion control games, in part because of trailblazers like Wii Sports, which are there to introduce us to the Wiimote. Just look at the original Super Mario on the NES and compare to Super Mario 3. They almost look like they belong to different systems. Could Nintendo have made Mario 3 be the launch title on their system? Sure if they spent enough time on it, but they had something great that was still unfamiliar enough in Mario 1, essentially the birth of the platformer genre, and later refined it.
I have no doubt that if you take Top Spin, a game I personally think is everything a tennis game every needed to be, and do a sensible port to the Wii, you’d have the greatest tennis game ever made. I’m creaming my pants in anticipation of Fight Night on the Wii. I haven’t liked baseball games since the original Bases Loaded, but I think someone can do something awesome on the Wii. Bowling has always been fucking boring in games to me, but hell if someone licensed The Big Labowski for the Wii, I’d give it a rental. I didn’t expect to get all of this out of the box. It and much more will come in time, in fact I myself have had and have heard from others around me of so many really interesting game ideas that I’d really be surprised if the Wii doesn’t have an awesome future ahead of it. Ofcouse it all hinges on other companies’ mastery of the Wiimote and Nanchuck, but I do expect great things. Wii Sports was all it needed to be. It is but a demo disc.
June 2nd, 2007 at 1957
I’m tired of hearing about Wii Sports; WarioWare: Smooth Moves is the only Wii game worth a damn, and don’t throw that dusty old Zelda at me. That game looks and plays like Grandma’s ribbon candy.
June 4th, 2007 at 1355
JerkBeast hit the nail on the head. I don’t think Wii Sports was ever meant to be much more than a neat little tech demo made to introduce the Wiimote to the masses and give us a reason to make Miis. The fact that it’s actually fun (HINT: get off your ass!), especially when the group is comprised of folk with various levels of gaming experience, AND that it’s packed in *FREE* with the system (remember when that was common practice?), would push it more towards a 3.5-, maybe 4-star review in my book. I suppose it’s easy to condemn the game as vapid or gimmicky after playing a couple rounds of each “sport” sitting alone on your couch, utilizing the aforementioned “toolbox” method. I personally got a lot of enjoyment out of the game, first in some spirited multiplayer sessions, and a semi-strict WiiFitness regimen for a couple weeks. Also, if you take the time to try going pro, you may start to realize just how much depth there really is to these games. I honestly think that the core mechanics of the bowling and golf games therein are deep enough to build full-blown, stand-alone simulations out of. But anyway, I’m rambling…
BTW, I got my wireless router for $30 on tigerdirect.com. That’s a helluva lot cheaper than an HDTV and a Live account.
June 4th, 2007 at 1426
If you thought Wii Sports was shalow piffle, you should get a load of Wii Play.
Wii Play is to Wii Sports as Ace Ventura is to Lawrence of Arabia.
June 4th, 2007 at 1537
Maybe I should reiterate that, in Japan, Wii Sports is not a pack-in game.
Over here, it costs about $50.
So . . . yeah.
June 5th, 2007 at 843
Can we imagine, kids, why it’s a pack-in game in the US and not in Japan?
I don’t know, because I don’t live in The Nippon! But I bet someone could help me out here.
June 5th, 2007 at 1623
Well… where to start??
First to me too is a bad idea that the Wii does not have a rj45 port, here in Mexico a wireless routers cost about $100, its expensive, well very expensive, and i have a Wii and a HDTV too, the ironic thing you are maybe wondering is, if you have the money to buy a $1000 HDTV and a $400 Nintendo Wii (Yes in Mexico the price of the Wii is $400, and if you are wondering the 360 cost $530 and the PS3 $1000), then how the heck you don’t buy a $100 wireless router!!??, well buy a wireless router only to hook my Wii to the internet to check the weather channel!! its not worth the price, and for the Virtual Console i’m not very interested because i own lots of the games that i would download and i admit it i use emulators the NES and SNES emulators work great.
Now with Wii sports, what i saw in that game was the potencial for what can the Wii can offer in the future, that bad thing is that i still hoping that i game that uses that interfaz in a precise and responsive way comes out, the bad thing with Wii sports is that que charm just extends for a few days, but i see it as a pick and play game, like a puzzle or solitary, and that is why i think it’s apealing to people, there is not commitment with the game, there is no arcade mode or tounament mode or somethink like that that make you play the game again for hours and hours, you just are bored, well why not kill some time with a match in tennis or boxing? it’s just gonna take some minutes of your time.
Now talking about me, the game it’s like solitary, maybe i will play once in a year, because i been playing videogames since i was 8 now i’m 26 and like HD graphics, attention to detail, deep gameplay etc etc. So i give Wii Sports 1/2 star, a complete star is too much.
I think why 108 thinks of the game in that way, expending a full price for a game that should be free like in America or cost about $10. if the game where not free i would never buy it, that’s for sure.
(And about the prices, those are the cheapest prices of the consoles, are prices for Wall Mart and Sam’s Club, in Liverpool cost a lot more.)
June 5th, 2007 at 1731
Well sorry for all the typos, this time i not cheked what i was writing here are some correction, i hope my sentences make more sence with the corrections:
1)
the potencial for what the Wii can offer in the future (the is a extra “can”)
2)
that bad thing is that i still hoping that a game
3)
he bad thing with Wii sports is that the charm just
Sorry i’ll be more carefull next time
June 14th, 2007 at 1407
Tim, this is one of the worst things you’ve ever written. Incoherent, smug, rambling, and multitudes too long, it really sums up all of the worst aspects of your writing.
June 20th, 2007 at 2316
i think we need to discuss more important things….like how the hell people managed to THROW controllers at the tv set based on the motion controls. i’ve played the boxing, and unless you (or i guess maybe grandma…) get THAT PUMPED that it just SLIPS out of your hands. what kind of grease balls are these people playing with?
August 12th, 2007 at 307
JerkBeast
“Its [wii sport's] whole purpose is as a demo and orientation disc.”
i disagree.
let’s see what nintendo has to say about wii sports:
“This is what video games should be: fun for everyone. Wii Sports offers five distinct sports experiences, each using the Wii Remote controller to provide a natural, intuitive and realistic feel. To play a Wii Sports game, all you need to do is pick up a controller and get ready for the pitch, serve or that right hook. If you’ve played any of these sports before, you’re ready for fun!”
so it seems nintendo and i believe its purpose is fun for everyone. it’s not an introduction to wii OR video games. in fact wii as a system is (apparently) so simple and intuitive you don’t even need an introduction to control schemes. you just pick up and play (if you’ve played any of these sports before).
wii sports doesn’t exist to validate the wii system; wii exists so you can have fun playing wii sports.
as for attracting grandmothers to playing video games for the first time, well, my grandmother was playing atari before some of you were even born!
saying that tim should be ‘fair’ and include this ‘true purpose’ of wii sports in HIS review is like asking him to apologize for HIS opinion.
furthermore, just as simplicity doesn’t equal fun, attracting non-users to use doesn’t equal revolutionary, if it did i would give NES that honorary title as most of us were non-gamers before we played NES (atari was my introduction…though i suppose those people who would hail subway sandwich corp. as a sandwich revolution do exist and would likely be sitting in on a board meeting and getting rich off of sandwiches, but let’s face it, none of us are sitting in on board meetings and getting rich off of wii).
speaking of duckhunt and super mario bros., both were also packaged along with the NES in america and i would argue calling that a simple introduction to the NES system would be mario-falling-in-a-lava-pit-dead wrong. just the same, duckhunt wasn’t an introduction to the zapper or anything else; it’s purpose was so that you could have fun using the zapper. i think it’s safe to say nintendo didn’t have time crisis in mind during development of duckhunt (in fact it was also the ONLY game i ever played using the zapper). just the same, super mario 1 wasn’t intended as a stepping stone to the great super mario 3; it was intended to be fun in itself. super mario 1 isn’t validated by smb3; it stood on it’s own BECAUSE it was FUN.
so, the purpose of games is for people to have fun; the purpose of games is NOT to be used as introductions or marketing schemes to lead to the fun games to (possibly) come. however that’s just my (and nintendo’s) opinion.
July 16th, 2009 at 240
This review? This right here?
Pretty much encapsulates why I happily sold my Wii a few months ago for a DSi and titles that have actually proven themselves to use… unconventional gaming technology in a fun and interesting way. (Or not, but the library is incredibly solid either way!)