Wii Sports Review

 (Originally published to Glitchwave on 7/2/2021)

[Image from igdb.com]

Wii Sports

Developer: Nintendo

Publisher: Nintendo

Genre(s): Sports

Platforms: Wii

Release Date: November 19, 2006

For those who don’t remember, the Nintendo Wii was nicknamed “the Nintendo Revolution” in its beta form a year before it came out. This ambitious-sounding nickname more or less foreshadowed the massive influence Nintendo’s next console would have on the gaming world for an entire generation. In the end, they went with the Nintendo “Wii,” a more twee nickname spelled out like someone decrypted hieroglyphics from an alien species. Considering how the console sold like hotcakes, “the revolution” would have been more apropos to signify how impactful it was. Still, Nintendo didn’t quite squander its tongue-in-cheek initiative to take the gaming world by storm. The campaign logo “Wii would like to play,” and the “We” in this statement alludes to the mass audience the Wii would garner due to its accessibility supported by the refined motion controls. Throughout its tenure, the Nintendo Wii became one of the fastest-selling consoles of all time after its international release. The game that was the cause of the Wii’s immediate success was Wii Sports, the game that came with every Wii console that showcased the console’s motion controls.

This wasn’t the first time Nintendo experimented with motion-control peripherals. As far back as the NES era, Nintendo has taken some bold strides to innovate the way that gamers played video games. Accessories like the Power Glove and the NES Zapper were certainly admirable attempts at deviating from the standard method of playing video games but claiming this is still a bit too diplomatic. They still didn’t prove to be more practical than the classic video game controller, so they became confined to the dark, dusty closets of gamers everywhere. Why insist on fixing what isn’t broken and what proves to not need an alternative to be enjoyable? Many generations later, Nintendo stubbornly kept innovating with these ideas and showcased an entire console around an entirely new mechanic. The last time they did this was with the Virtual Boy, a crimson, migraine-inducing disaster that made players bilious in seconds. The success of the Wii can be attributed to a simple factor that surpassed the other peripherals that failed: it worked. It didn’t sparsely give the player signs of life whenever the damn thing felt it was convenient; the Wii remote was as fluid and capable as your own body. After so many generations of failed products, they got it right.

What better to showcase this achievement in video game innovation than Wii Sports, a simple game with a selection of five different sports that are popular worldwide. After all, everyone loves sports! (Not me, the one-eyed, hapless nerd that didn’t get his first kiss until he was 17.) Sports are the pinnacle of worldwide wholesome entertainment, so the accessibility factor of the content matched with the innovative controls was destined to be a smash hit. You had a choice of five different sports to play, and each was fully functional with the controls. The playable characters were the Mii’s, the avatar creations made on the Wii menu. If you were an uncreative sucker, you’d make a Mii of yourself play this game, but us true innovators used this feature to make an army of playable characters composed of notable figures. My only hole-in-one in golf was made by Darth Vader, and my highest bowling score is with Tourettes Guy.

These games are more or less played exactly like you were participating in these sports in real life. Tennis involved hitting a green ball back and forth across a net, golf involved smacking a ball off the grass while minding wind conditions, baseball was played on a diamond field with a team of players, and bowling involved knocking down pins and rolling a ball down a slicked, Maplewood lane. Boxing, my favorite of the five, introduced the nunchuck, an attachment to the Wiimote with an analog stick and two additional buttons. You hit your enemies with the Wiimote and the nunchuck acting as both arms and punch accordingly, just like real boxing. It was like a kinetic version of Punch-Out!! To make these sports believably immersive, all you had to execute on the Wiimote was a simple swipe most of the time, making for the most hands-on and simple way to play all of these sports in a video game.

As someone who doesn’t like sports, did I have fun with this game? Absolutely. Nothing was more exciting than the Nintendo Wii, my first foray into experiencing a new console generation. Getting the first taste of what the console had to offer was a rousing affair, but the novelty of the motion controls wore off quickly. This game is simple to a fault as there is nothing much else to do after you play each of these sports a couple of times. This is even the case playing this game with friends. After testing what the Wii had to offer with Wii Sports, one can’t help but to want more from the system and its controls.

After the success of the Wii, motion controls became an industry-sweeping phenomenon. Sony implemented a risque-looking motion controller that looked an awful lot like a sex toy, and Microsoft had the Kinect, which did away with tangible peripherals entirely. Alas, the old guard using a standard controller triumphed over the new guard. The motion controls of the Wii ultimately became a fad instead of the revolution Nintendo had strived for. Today, Wii Sports and the Wii itself are as archaic as they were in that South Park episode that depicted one in the distant future. However, that doesn’t mean that the game's impact is lost. Wii Sports ushered in the “casual gamer market” now monopolized by the mobile gaming industry. Thousands of people that did not care about video games one way or another were waiting in long lines to purchase them. My grandfather, who has discrepancies with most things that aren’t guns, beer, or golf, has said that video games are to blame for crime, drugs, and all sorts of perversions in the world. Yet, he bought a Wii before I even had one because Wii Sports looked so alluring to him. That fact alone is why the novelty of Wii Sports deserves a place to be remembered as a milestone in video gaming. And some probably remember it more vividly but less fondly if you had to drop a couple hundred dollars for a new television if you managed to break it playing this game.