It may not be reinventing the wheel, but Nintendo Switch Sports is exactly what I wanted from the Wii Sports’ successor.
Let’s not mince words. Wii Sports is one of the best and most important games of all time. Sure, over time it became a poster-child for ‘waggle’, a breed of motion control where it often feels like your movements don’t really matter as long as you’re giving the controller a shake – but for a few years there, back in the mid-2000s, this was the little game that could. Moreover, it ruled. There was a reason people were over-excitedly flinging their controllers through their expensive new 720 flat-screen TVs with such frequency that Nintendo had to invent dumb little flak jackets for the Wii Remote – it was engaging. People were getting so into it that they’d move their body way more than they needed to, and then a slight loosening of grip, and… whoops! A fatigue quickly built up, though. There was a real cavalcade of rubbish that aimed to scoop that massive Wii Sports audience; so we got guff like Wii Play and Wii Party,2K’s Carnival games, and loads else besides. Then the actual follow-up, Wii Sports Resort, pulled a classic Nintendo move and required a stupid, expensive accessory to play. That killed that game for me; Wii Sports was best multiplayer, and there was no way I was buying four of those things. A detour on the Wii U is forgotten, as the Wii U itself is. But time has passed. These missteps feel far in the rear-view mirror, and I now feel a great deal of nostalgia for Wii Sports. I recognize how good it was. I’ve been hungering for another for a while. That meant the pressure was on when I went for a hands-on session with Nintendo Switch Sports, the new Joy-Con waggling revival. Here’s the headline, though: I loved it. It’s brilliant. It’s not revelatory, but it’ll probably be one of my favorite games of the year regardless. The contents of Switch Sports feels like the result of a carefully-considered mathematical equation. Two sports return from the original Wii Sports (tennis and bowling), one returns from Wii Sports Resort (sword fighting, presented here as Chambara, which is a Japanese word to describe samurai movies), and three all-new sports.
