Wii Sports Impressions: A Family Perspective

Wii Sports is the disk of five simple sports games that comes with a Wii console: baseball, tennis, golf, boxing, and bowling. At this point, our family has played for about six hours over the past four nights. We haven’t been able to hunt down another controller, so all of these impressions are based on single-player mode.

If anything highlights the Wii’s potential, it’s that the bare bones games of Wii Sports bring such incredible entertainment value. Superficially, these five games are laughably simple. There is no fielding in baseball, for example. Tennis is doubles only. The only nod to a career mode in the games is that you gain points with good performances, and if you reach 1,000 in a given sport, you earn “pro” status. Feature-wise, these games are almost throwbacks to late 1980’s gaming. These same five games, ported to the Xbox or PS3, would be painfully boring and receive abysmal reviews. With the Wii’s controller, however, it’s a whole new game, and each of these games brings hours of fun and laughs.

From a marketing perspective, including Wii Sports with the system is a brilliant move on Nintendo’s part. For parties and family events the game is a hoot. It will earn Nintendo more revenue from increased Wii system sales than the game’s development could ever have cost.

The Wii Sports love fest runs across our whole family. My wife, who was fairly skeptical about getting a Wii and has probably played an hour’s worth of games in the past five years, is now fully on board after watching our five-year-old son play tennis the past two nights. He throws the ball up, runs around, swings the racket, makes grunting noises, and laughs the whole time. Living in a cold climate, it can be hard to wear him out in the winter, and according to my wife, he was completely exhausted from playing tennis for a half hour last night. And he had a ball doing it.

My wife as well is having a grand time with the various games. She doesn’t play long, but she plays and plays on her own, to boot. She has had a lot of fun with bowling, tennis, and golf. As we were bowling the other night, she casually mentioned that we should take the Wii with us to an upcoming evening at another couple’s house. “It’d make for a great evening,” she added. One week ago, if someone told me in a week’s time my wife would tell me we should bring a gaming system over to a friend’s house, I would have countered with something like, “Yeah, and this year the Cubs are going to win the World Series.” But the Wii does that to you. It is so infectiously fun, that you just can’t help it. It’s entertaining, it’s social, it’s intuitive, and it’s challenging.

The only one that is luke warm on the system is our three-year-old daughter. She doesn’t quite get the concept of some of the games yet. She has trouble waiting for the ball in tennis and handling the b-button press and release in bowling. She doesn’t seem that interested in baseball. Much to our concern, however, she greatly enjoys the boxing. She flails away with her arms, smiling and swinging as she pummels yet another hapless victim to the tarp. She is now an undefeated 3-0 after tonight’s 2-1 decision victory.

All in all, from a family perspective, the Wii and Wii Sports have been a tremendous hit, and by themselves validate the $250 purchase. I can see us getting together and having fun with this for quite a while. And I think things will ramp up another level when we can find another controller for two-player action.

Up next: individual impressions on each of the five Wii Sports games.