Wii Sports is back, baby! Creatively titled Switch Sports, the sequel to one of the most popular games of all time was announced at the Direct yesterday, and will be upon us later this year. But can it ever truly measure up to the original?
Calling Wii Sports one of the most popular titles of all time may be slightly misleading. It was a pack-in game with the Wii, and therefore sold over 100 million copies almost by default. But many would place it as one, of if not the, best game the Wii ever had. If you’re the best thing on a console that over 100 million people bought, you’re probably doing something right. I’d even say it’s the best motion based game ever, but then with the Wii the only console to make a serious success in the motion business, so that’s not too surprising.
This brings us to Switch sports. The Nintendo Switch is a motion console, but it puts far less emphasis on the motion based activities. On the Wii, you could sit in a chair and hold the remote sideways to play, but few people did. On the Switch, it’s reversed. Most people play handheld or with a Pro Controller, rather than standing in their living rooms and flailing their arms about. The Joy-Con are smaller, making them more ergonomic but less tactile as, say, a tennis racket, and seem less precise and sensitive than the Wii Remote Plus. The Switch has outsold the Wii, and boasts a better catalogue when you consider all the games you can play with a Pro Controller, but it lacks some of the Wii’s magic.
It was this magic that made Wii Sports so special. Wii Sports had some training modes and minigames that you could sink your teeth into, but mainly it was just the five sports: Golf, Bowling, Tennis, Baseball, and Boxing. While they all used the remote in slightly different ways, the three simplest games (golf, bowling, and tennis) were by far the most popular, and that’s why they’re returning. You could grab the Wii Remote in your hand and feel like you were swinging a tennis racket around for real - if Mario Tennis Aces is any indication, on the Switch it will feel like you’re holding a toy and playing a game.
Baseball and Boxing have been cut, replaced by four new games. Chambara comes from Wii Sports resort and is essentially fencing meets pugil sticks, while volleyball, badminton, and football are completely new. Volleyball and badminton slot in quite easily, although you don’t actually hold anything in volleyball and badminton is somewhat similar to tennis, so how much they add to the texture of the game remains to be seen. Then there’s football, which I have absolutely no words for.
Here’s some anyway. Football is my favourite sport, and the most popular in the world, which means a lot of people love it as much as I do. It’s the one sport capable of changing my mood and influencing my week, so on that note, thank you Kieran Trippier. Switch Sports is less ‘actual football’ and more ‘Rocket League without the cars’, but I’m still not convinced. It looks like you flick the Joy-Con forward to launch yourself into diving headers at the massive ball, but is there any way to pass? To dribble? To tackle? Is there any positional play or set pieces? It just looks like your character bumbles around until the ball is near enough for them to launch a Robin van Persie-style diving header at it in the vain hopes of picking up a Puskas Award.
It doesn’t really look like football at all, and nor does it look like something built for hours of motion control fun. If you want FIFA, go play FIFA, right? But if you want Rocket League, go play Rocket League. Football’s great but it’s far more complicated than all the other sports here, and feels like a silly inclusion. The kicking minigame looks okay, but both Wii Fit and Kinect Sports Rivals already did it better.
You’ll also notice before I said ‘character’ and not ‘Mii’. The designs seem much blander and safer than the more eccentric Miis of Wii Sports, but that’s not really a thing I care about - other than the fact it speaks to a very ‘design by committee, this game will sell’ development philosophy. Mainly, while I’m excited enough for Switch Sports, that excitement comes entirely from Wii Sports rather than anything I saw in the Direct. It just feels boring.
Wii Sports is a fantastic game, a master of simplicity and a genius in the motion capture genre, ably assisted by a console that embraced the family-centric design and saw motion capture as the best way to play. The Switch is more focused on being a games console than a toy, and so the motion capture has been downplayed, leading to shaky foundations for Switch Sports. Only time will tell, but I don’t expect this to live up to the heights of the Wii.