A to Z Challenge: Wii Sports

 Back in 2010 I had one of my brilliant holiday ideas:  I was going to joke gift everyone in my family a Snuggie!  I got like 5 of them and then sent them to my mom's house, figuring it'd be easier to do that than to try to fit them in my Focus along with the real gifts.

My genius plan for mischief was ruined when of course my sisters snooped in the box.  With the joke ruined, I decided to do a 180 and get them a really good gift instead.  So I got them a Nintendo Wii.  The Wii had been out for a couple of years, being that gift everyone wanted but stores didn't have in the holiday season a couple of years earlier.  But by now they were available and cheaper.

So after hooking the thing up to my mom's living room TV, we put in the game that came with it:  Wii Sports.  The game that comes with a system is usually one that's supposed to give you an idea of what the machine can do, like Combat for the Atari 2600 or Super Mario Bros/Duck Hunt for the NES.  In this case, maybe Wii Sports was too good at its job.

As you'd expect, Wii Sports features sports.  There was tennis, baseball, golfing, bowling, and boxing.  None of these games were really complicated and all of them took advantage of the Wii's motion-capture thing.  That was where you moved and the character on the screen would do the same thing--supposedly.  Sometimes it could be a little wonky.

The games were almost all really fun.  We had such a good time--even my mom who probably never played a video game in her life--that when I got home, I decided to get a Wii for myself.  I think the one I got came with Wii Sports and one of its sequels:  Wii Sports Resort which had basketball, fencing, water skiing, new golf and bowling games, and some other things.  It was OK, though Wii Sports was still the gold standard.

But while the games are fun, the novelty starts to wear off after a little while.  All of the games are basically mini-games.  You can't play a season of baseball or basketball or any of those.  You can't really play a lot of different courses or courts with the golf or tennis.  So it's pretty easy for it to get boring after a little while.

As I've said a few times before, the problem then became that a lot of the other games for the Wii didn't really take advantage of the motion capture stuff.  Especially the non-Nintendo ones distributed to multiple platforms, it seemed the companies didn't want to take the time to program something especially for that technology and so the controls would be clumsy or downright terrible or just not really use the motion stuff at all.  Some like NBA Jam or Super Mario Bros you could actually use a "classic" controller, ie just play them like a regular game.

I spent plenty of money on Wii games and accessories I thought might take advantage of it like the Wii Fit platform thing that would supposedly let you walk.  But again, there were few games that really used that and it didn't really work great for a fat guy like me--it actually said I was underweight!  I got one of those dancing games with the mat but found it was made for people with tiny feet.  Not that my feet are huge either.  Within a year or so most of that stuff I traded in to Amazon or other sites and mostly I used the Wii like a Roku to play Netflix movies or whatever.  Eventually I sold the Wii itself along with Wii Sports.

In the end, it's a fun game, but one fun game (or two really with Wii Sports Resorts) isn't really enough to sustain a whole console.