50 Years of Video Games: Wii Sports (Wii)
While the Nintendo DS and games like Nintendogs were a strong foothold for Nintendo’s new casual gamer focus, it was the Wii and its pack-in title Wii Sports in 2006 that really threw open the floodgates. Motion controls were even more natural than touch screens for interactive digital entertainment, a controller shaped like a remote that could read how you moved it smartly accompanied by a game that contextualized it by imitating real world sports. Swinging the remote like a baseball bat, golf club, or tennis racket removed the need for learning a game or system before playing it for many, Wii Sports’s five available sports enough to launch the Wii to incredible sales. For many the Wii would even just be a Wii Sports machine, the device’s controls making it far more accessible than getting a group together to play the real sports while also removing many of the barriers of required athleticism in the process.
Wii Sports brings with it five major sports: Tennis, Bowling, Golf, Baseball, and Boxing. The quality of them does range a bit and some by their very nature do require more attention in terms of design than others, but universally the sports all lean on using the Wii’s Mii system for its characters. After customizing your Miis from the Wii’s main channel menu you are asked which one you want to play as when you boot up a sport, each one having a skill rating that is tracked based on how well you do when you play. Each sport allows you to become a Pro once your skill rating reaches a total of 1000 points, this having minor cosmetic changes like giving you a new special ball for Bowling but also tying into the game’s difficulty. If you are playing against game-controlled opponents instead of other human players, the skill rating will determine how competent the AI will be, this dynamic difficulty rating eventually letting you find your sweet spot for a competitive match in that sport. However, since each rating is tied to a Mii, you can choose to play as another one if you do want to essentially start over from the easy matches.
Going in the order the sports selection menu presents them would lead you to first select Tennis, and unfortunately it’s one of the weakest sports in the package. Tennis is always presented in a two on two format, the player able to actually play as an identical pair of Miis who will swing at the same time on their side of the court if they don’t want to team up with an AI or another human player. The swinging of your racket is fairly responsive and you can get a volley going easily enough, the sport providing some simple fun close to the real sport but one gameplay choice does let it down some. In Tennis you only control the movement of your racket, your Miis running around on their own. With no control over your movement there are times when a player should have been able to reach the ball and return it but the game simply did not allow it, one of the most egregious cases being a reliable technique where certain conditions allow a player to return a serve in a way impossible for the server to hit back. You can set the match to be longer to counteract the guaranteed points a player might earn this way, but a lot of points will be earned more by the game deciding not to move your character well rather than failing to maintain the volley, making this sport one best dabbled in rather than played long term.
Baseball is a bit of an improvement even though it takes a few vital parts of the sport out of the player’s hand as well. In Baseball you will not handle any of the base running or fielding, the Miis that make up the teams again controlled by the game for these vital functions. Unlike in Tennis though there are set positions on a baseball field so it’s reasonable when maybe they aren’t positioned perfectly for a catch and they do handle themselves fairly well for the most part, although you will have to come to accept there will be errors where they ball slips from their glove more often then you might expect. If you can accept this is just a visual touch rather than the Mii being incompetent then it’s easier to accept, especially since an error usually just leads to an extra base being given up rather than a devastating loss. In Baseball though you’ll mostly be focusing on the batting and pitching, and in that way it actually ends up mostly a mind game between the players controlling the pitcher and batter. The batter’s goal is still to hit the ball out in the field without it being caught, but the pitcher is given a fair few options for how to throw the ball towards the plate. Beyond the motion control’s influence in terms of power, you also are able to press directions on the D-Pad or certain buttons to add special twists to how the ball flies. Directional presses allow it to head more to the left or right while button presses can turn the pitch into a curveball or even have your pitcher throw the ball underhanded, the focus being on trying to outsmart the batter to get them out while the batter needs to identify where the ball is flying if they want to get a good hit in. A mercy rule does exist if one player gets far ahead and then the other doesn’t score at all and the base version is a 3 inning game to keep the game from running too long in this simplified version, and since your team in Baseball is made up of Miis you’ve made on your Wii it can also just be fun to see who is randomly selected to play alongside you for this pared down version of the sport.
Bowling is perhaps the true success of the package, to the point that a retirement home I worked at was still whipping out the Wii almost a decade after the game’s release so that the residents could keep playing Wii Bowling. Rather than needing to lug a heavy ball to a lane and hurling it down with a good amount of force to hit the pins, you simply pull back the remote and swing it forward, force still important but the act is simplified down to the point that even novices can knock down every pin with a little luck and sound aim. The remote can read a twist to the throw so you can try to clear splits, but the gutters are much less of a danger than in real life unless you already know you’re aiming rather close to them. Bowling is technically rather simple but it isn’t really leaving out any aspect of the sport in being basic, the player able to move their Mii’s standing position and adjust the angle of their throw as well so you do have the means to change your throw if needed. Bowling is the first of the covered sports where you can play it on your own or with other human players, trying to get a higher score being the main objective so your skill rating is more a tracker of how consistent you are at playing rather than a means of determining who you play against. The same simple thrill of knocking things over the real sport hits is present but skill is still needed to bowl an exceptional game, it’s just that less able players are also given the means to clear away plenty of pins without having to worry too much about their arm strength or the gutters in this virtual version.
Golf is another game realized quite well. There are nine unique holes to play that you can either tackle all in one session or play in three hole sets divided by their difficulty. However you choose to play, the golfing is probably the only game that ever really hits on responsiveness issues, but that’s more because the strength of your swing is so key to the sport. Hitting the ball into the hole will sometimes require quite precise power levels, and while usually swinging the remote like a club will hit the ball as expected, gentler swings or subtle distinctions can be a little lost unless you start moving the remote in less than normal ways. For the most part though you can acclimate to the power meter that helps show you how strong your swing is while a line across a minimap of the course shows the expected flight path based on the power meter, the player even able to swap between broad club types like the wedge, driver, and putter if they believe a different club might be better than the automatically suggested one. There is a fair bit of variety within the nine holes with the designs inspired by those featured in Golf for NES. Besides typical hazard placement variation like trees, water, and sand bunkers, you have things like a course where you need to hit your ball across islands to reach the hole, a long one where you can try to hit to a small safe place among trees if you’re tempted by the risky shortcut, a course with a winding river through it, and some shorter ones where you can land a hole in one if you just find the right power and angle. Wind will have an impact on your ball’s flight though and this is again a sport you can play on your own, Golf mostly capturing the expected details of the sport even if nine holes might be a little lean.
Boxing is the last sport on offer and probably the biggest break in concept from the others, this being the sport most likely to tire out the player since they will be needing to mimic punches with the Wii remote and nunchuck. When you’re first starting off in Boxing it can feel a little simple, random punching likely enough to take down the AI opponents before you, but once you’ve built up some skill or if you choose to fight another human player, Boxing does get a bit more depth. You can dodge with your fighter and aim your punches as well as position your gloves for defense, the fight becoming more about interaction between the boxers as you will need to defend and weave around blows more when the foe is a competent one. There are some extra maneuvers here too like being able to pull off hooks or even charged up punches, but among the sports on offer it is definitely the one where a discrepancy in player skill can impact enjoyability. Golf and Bowling can be enjoyed alone and while the game controlling movement in Tennis and Baseball do diminish their potential, they also keep players focused on one task that is often fairly simple. Boxing is an interplay between two participants and a skilled fighter can trounce someone less skilled, but while it may not fit the simple accessibility of the other sports, it is a fun little way to work up a sweat that isn’t too mindless.
Outside of the five sports the menu also has two other options. Fitness will throw a set of little sports challenges at you in a row, the idea being it is testing your ability to see what your “fitness age” is, comparing you to the expected physical condition someone of a certain age would be. These fitness challenges aren’t really the best test unsurprisingly, more of a challenge you can do once per day to see how you might be improving at the little trials taken from the game’s other remaining mode, Training. Training isn’t always trying to improve you at a sport per se so much as it is presenting new gameplay challenges within the context of those sports, although getting good at one will likely benefit you during normal play as well. Tennis’s three games are mostly endurance challenges, the player needing to return balls and sometimes hitting them in the right area as they do so, but with running out of your control still sometimes returning them might feel out of your hands so sadly Tennis comes up short in this extra content as well. Baseball actually takes a good approach to Training, the aim being consistency as you need to do things like hit every incoming ball, do your best to smack home runs, or try to hit the ball into specific regions of the field.
Bowling’s feel the most like minigames, one featuring an ever expanding number of pins with each roll and the satisfaction of watching 91 pins fall over from your throw is certainly a strong one. Picking up spares from the available pins does challenge your ability to pull off trick throws, but the barriers place in the lane for Spin Practice both present an interesting challenge and do a good job of teaching you how to spin your throws should you ever need it elsewhere. Golf has a fun minigame-like training challenge too where you try to hit a ball into target regions and earn different points depending on how spot-on you are, but the other two that focus on trying to putt in the ball or reliably get it on the green do also do a good job with their focus figuring out how to approach the hole. Boxing rounds things off with a great mix of minigame styling and practical purpose, one about trying to knock away as many punching bags as you can in a time limit, another about dodging balls your trainer is throwing, and the last one about punching the right areas. Having different goals to aim for here in terms of score makes training a good way to get more out of the game even if you’ve gone Pro in the sports, but multiplayer and chasing things like the best possible score in bowling also work together to make Wii Sports a game with greater longevity than briefly dabbling in each sport to see what they’re like.
THE VERDICT: While restricting the amount of control the player has to just the basics does lead to some issues with Tennis, the five options available in Wii Sports range from smartly done simplifications of the sport to ones that are still decent enough to dabble in for some quick fun. Motion controls still allow some skill to factor into how well you perform but Bowling and Golf are made much more accessible than their real life counterparts and the Training mode’s minigame-like presentation even gives a few imaginative twists to how the sports can be played. The core of each sport is preserved and made easy to interact with, this little showcase for the Wii’s motion controls finding an effective balance making most of the sports have some level of depth but not to the level that a casual player is missing out for just playing the game in the way that feels natural to them.
And so, I give Wii Sports for Wii…
A GOOD rating. Tennis and Boxing are a bit of the odd ducks out in this package, Boxing for being a more focused and skill-dependent affair than most other sports in a way that makes it interesting but Tennis removing too much of the player input and leading to issues like the impossible-to-return hit. The tennis players having their movement controlled by the game did make it more approachable for casual audiences no doubt as keeping up with the ball is essentially the hard part of the sport, but hitting the ball in a way the opponent can’t reach it is also the aim of tennis so taking your ability to respond to a tricky hit away also dampens the potential enjoyability of this one sport. However, the game does usually do a decent enough job that it doesn’t turn the game into a sequence of frequent frustrations, Baseball handling things a bit better since it is inherently a team sport with reliance on people you don’t normally control and their competence levels are usually less tied to game-changing moments than in Tennis. Different tastes will definitely determine which sport is best enjoyed by the players and that’s part of the appeal, the game able to provide a good mix where even one sport working well enough can give the game a fair bit of longevity with training minigames and their score challenges to give more goal-focused players something to latch onto outside of improving their Golf and Bowling performance. The Pro ranking does so in a similar manner while also making sure players are never going to face an AI opponent way out of their league, Wii Sports doing well in trying to tailor play towards a broad audience with different ideas of what they might want out of it and what they’re capable of.
The Wii U remake Wii Sports Club would make some changes like giving golf a full 18 hole course that expand the game without making it so complex it loses its intended audience, but the original Wii Sports is almost more like a sports sampler where future games for the system could try and do something like Baseball with more depth and more of the expected rules of the sport in tact. Wii Sports mostly finds a good level for keeping you involved in the sport’s main focus, be that punching another person, hitting a ball into a hole, or knocking pins down, and while there wasn’t a way to completely remove the impact of things like fielding in Baseball and positioning in Tennis, those less cleanly adapted versions of the sport can still be appealing once you adjust your mindset to their limitations. Wii Sports really is a smart pack-in for the system, to the point some people only ever used it for Wii Sports because it provides the bite-sized adjustments of real sports in a form that is quick to get into and doesn’t demand too much of the player. For the system that would lead the casual gaming revolution that’s all it needed to do, that appealing design still making it fun to return to even now just because the basics are right where they need to be to ensure it remains enjoyable to swing that Wii remote around and pretend to play a sport.