Wii Sports - Playing two player

So, I finally got my Wii last Sunday. My friends in Salt Lake are awesome and pooled their resources together to get me one for my birthday. Well, they put the money together to get me one. They weren't in stock when they were looking and it took a week before stores got in shipments again. Fortunately, people aren't crazy for them anymore so my friend and I got to Circuit City a few minutes after it opened and they still had about a half dozen left.

Wii Sports was the main game I played on Sunday and then ended up playing Monday and yesterday as well. Previously, I had tried it out at a friend's place and was very impressed by tennis and bowling. In fact, the quality of tennis and bowling is what inspired me to actually be interested in getting a Wii as soon as it had a few more good software titles (including virtual console downloads). So I knew Tennis and Bowling were good. I tried boxing and it was fun to watch and not bad to participate in against another player, but it couldn't say it was actually a good game. I'd heard baseball was pretty good too.

What surprised me was golf. No one I knew had talked positively about golf. There wasn't a ton of negative stuff said about it either, but it was never listed when people talked about the good games in Wii Sports. I can somewhat understand. It isn't very deep and it isn't really an accurate simulation of golf. It doesn't check the position of the remote when you would be hitting the ball and thus doesn't determine hook or slice that way. All it really measures is how quickly you move the remote forward. For all of this inaccuracy to actual golf, it is still a fun game. You still have to take wind, terrain, and slope into account when lining up your shot. Instead of having to press a button twice to determine power and accuracy*, you instead just swing the remote. If you put too much power on it, you will hook or slice. It is a very simple use of the Wii's motion sensing capabilities and yet it still really adds to the game. You can have a fun game of challenging a friend to several holes that requires moving about to determine your shots. It is entertaining to play, even alone, and lots of fun with friends. It certainly has made me consider looking into getting a Tiger Woods or other golf video game for the Wii that uses waggle.

Baseball is pretty nice too. You don't control fielding or base running, but for the most part I think that is fine. At first I thought it was all about batting, but the last game I played, my friend and I got into more of a pitcher's duel. The batting is pretty awesome, though. When I keep trying for home runs, I tend to fly out a lot more, just like in actual baseball.

So that makes four of the five games on Wii Sports being genuinely fun and I'd say that's a great ratio. Heck even boxing is fun when you have two players going at it and a bunch of people over.

*I know the modern golf games now use the analog stick(s) for power and accuracy, but the most recent golf game I've played was Mario Golf: Advance Tour for the Game Boy Advance so no analog stick. Before that, I think the last golf game I played was in 1993 or so.