Wii Sports Review

By NGamer Staff for NGamer Magazine Subscribe now!

Predictable. Basic. Dull. These are some of the adjectives that tarred our thoughts whenever Wii Sports came up. None of the games seemed to have that Ninty spark - they felt stripped down and simplistic, and destined to be a little straightforward and dry. But! Having played the finished games properly now, we realise we were completely and utterly wrong, and have taken to punching ourselves in the temples with nunchuks as penance for the sin of low expectations. There's an awful lot more to Wii Sports than getting your dad to play along, and there's also more to it than the hype being spun in women's magazines like Prima, which would have us believe that Videogames are the Way to a Slim New You! The truth is somewhere in between - this is an important game, yes, one that challenges perceptions about what videogames are, but it's also stupid amounts of fun, and will keep you coming back like an eel on a spring.

Easy Target

There's a reason it initially feels overly simple. It's designed to be accessible - of course it is - to get people to use the controller. Anyone could pick this up, have a bash through the games over half an hour or so and have a fairly good time. There's scarcely a button press anywhere, and the gameplay itself is reliant on naturalistic, fluid arm movements and the occasional wrist twist. Nintendo want your non-gaming mum to play this. They're also trying really hard to get your nan on it too. They're selling it as Sport In Your Living Room. But it's not.

Tennis, for example, is a great big con. It's not about aiming the ball at one side of the court or another, and you don't need to guide the remote through the air, pixel by pixel - it's about timing your return correctly to get the ball to fly in the right direction. A quick return will shoot the ball off at a wide angle - good for a backhand sweep across the width of the court - while a longer return will send the ball back in a straight line. There's a similar strategy at work in the other games too, for example in Baseball to determine whether you bat the ball straight out of the park, or hit it wide into the face of an unsuspecting Mii in the crowd. It's not sport. It's a videogame. You can't just play it as you would the real games - there's a subtly complex control system that needs to be mastered. Even so, most of the training minigames will only offer you instructions like "Try and focus on making the shot", encouraging you to listen to your body's natural intuition. The really crazy thing is that you will, no matter how much you want to get the moves down pat and efficient.

Naturally we tried to cheat the controls, bowling from our beanbag and smashing volleys from the sofa, but the unavoidable fact is that the best way to play it - both to get the best results from the control mechanics, as well as to have the most fun - is to pretend you're playing for real. Imagine you're actually holding a tennis raquet; use both hands and pretend you're putting with a golf club. It's all a wee bit Zen - learn how your remote wishes to be wielded, and it'll hammer your scores up into the big time. And to any faux-hardcore folk out there saying, "But surely a simple swooshing game with scarcely any button presses won't entertain us for long?" we say: look at real tennis.

No Rest For The Wii Kids

And here's the point, really. You can play Zelda on the couch if you want to, but to get the most out of Wii Sports you'll need to be on your feet. And when we say need, we mean want. It's an excellent collection that's successful on every level: casual, intensive, drunken multiplayer... It's also, we hope, much more than a launch novelty - it's the first in a long line of games that are going to permanently affect the way the mainstream media tries to blame everything from social maladjustment to childhood obesity on videogames. Not because it's making an important statement about gaming (even though it is), but because once you get into it, it's really bloody good fun.