The first Wii party; Wii Sports reviewed

1:14 PM on 11.12.2006   |   World Famous

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Yesterday I ventured up to New Haven, Conn., to visit some friends and, of course, give them a chance to play with the Wii before it dropped onto store shelves next Sunday. I brought all the games I had -- Wii Sports, Excite Truck, and Zelda -- and I would say we ended up playing the Wii for no less than 5-7 hours total.

Here's some video of us boys in action. Check out my impressions of Wii Sports after the jump. (I'm saving a full Zelda impression until I have played more of the game. I don't want to short change you all. Excite Truck, well, I'll probably have something more on it a little later.)

Wii Sports

Tennis: Second best only to bowling, we probably played tennis the most out of all of the options. While the game is not the most realistic representation of tennis in the world, it is fun and you do get used to its pace and feel. In fact, as we got better with it, the matches got fairly intense and heated.

Grade: B+

Bowling: Best part of Wii Sports, hands down. Possibly the most realistic out of the bunch, as well. One aspect I especially liked was the fact that the game saves your high scores and when you're in a group environment you feel a need to make sure you beat your friend's score. Otherwise, you just feel like a complete loser. The control and feel when bowling is pretty spot on. I'd definitely say, even though we played tennis the most, everyone enjoyed bowling over everything else. 

Grade: A

Baseball: Playing baseball never felt quite right. We were always unsure of what exactly to do to hit the ball effectively. Pitching is fairly intuitive and straight forward and probably the better action of the game to perform because you had more control over what you were doing. Batting felt more like a game of luck than actual skill. Another annoyance about the game is the fact you can't control the other players on the field and don't throw to the bases -- basically if you hit the ball in the infield or do a pop fly, you're out.

Grade: C

Golf: This one is just about near the bottom on the crap scale of games in Wii Sports. It felt unprecise and worst of all, you felt as if you didn't really have control over what was happening -- which is sad, because golf is all about mastering control. When I played it, all I could think of was: "Wow, this sucks, but I can't wait to see how they make it better (or hope they do) with the Tiger Woods license."

Grade: D-

Boxing: Maybe a hair above golf on the suck meter, boxing is another Wii Sports title that feels like you have no control. Besides bobbing and weaving, it never felt like you had complete control of your boxer and what he or she was doing. Punches seemed random and the whole punching system seemed unresponsive.

Grade: D

Overall: Because Wii Sports is packaged with the system, it's hard to be overly critical of it. What the experience really shows you is the possibility of more polished games in the genre and actually leaves you eager to find out what can happen when those titles start to hit. Besides the games, there's also a couple workout and training options that are more less like Brain Age except they use different aspects of the Wii Sports games. Basically, this is a fun game that's the perfect option right now when you have a bunch of people over that want to play the Wii. In a nutshell, it's probably what we all expected it to be.

Grade: B-