Wii Sports Club – Wii U

Enough improvements to make it a worthwhile purchase for the Wii U, July 25, 2014

The first thing to know about Wii Sports Club is that if you’ve played the original Wii Sports on the Wii, there’s really nothing new in terms of the gameplay or the basic experience. You have baseball, tennis, bowling, golf, and boxing. The controls work pretty much identically to the original–you hold the Wii remote in your hand to bat, volley, bowl, tee off, and punch.

It’s tough to justify paying for a game that we all got for free with the original Wii. But for a couple reasons I think it’s worth it. Here are the main ones:

1) Improved graphics: As Microsoft and Sony were competing to see who could get the most powerful and realistic HD graphics, I love how Nintendo went the opposite direction and created a world of ingeniously simple cartoony characters (Miis) that seemed to have their own personalities. Not only did it look great, it meant that games would be incredibly responsive, something that Xbox 360 developers never figured out how to do with their slow-as-molasses motion controls.

Now that the Wii U supports HD graphics, I’m glad to see that Nintendo kept the whole Mii universe as-is, but added a lot of background details (the texture on the playing surface, beautiful scenery, crowd animation, etc.) to enhance the experience. The graphics improvements are more subtle and aren’t as dramatic as, say, the improvements they made to Mario Kart 8 over Mario Kart Wii, but they’re still very good.

2) Smart (not gratuitous) use of the GamePad: The GamePad is one of the most panned features of the Wii U and not without reason–it’s a piece of hardware they released before giving developers a chance to figure out how to best to exploit it. As a result, most games that supposedly support the GamePad do it in a really forced way. However, Wii Sports Club makes intelligent use of the GamePad to make gameplay a lot more fun. Specifically, in baseball, one player holds the GamePad to pitch; gone are the days when you could glance over at the player to figure out what kind of pitch they’re throwing. You can also hold the GamePad in front of you to have a first-person view of catching fly balls and line drives in a way that feels surprisingly realistic. Also, in golf, you put the GamePad on the ground and literally “tee up” just like you do in real life, which is both clever and makes the experience feel all the more realistic. I actually like that they didn’t try to “force” GamePad use in the other sports, simply because it wouldn’t have added anything to them.

3) Improved controls: I remember playing Wii Sports together with a group of five year olds and getting destroyed when they were just bouncing around like a bunch of jumping beans and wagging their remotes. Those days are over 🙂

The motion control capabilities of the original Wii remote were pretty basic, but later down the road Nintendo released the Wii MotionPlus attachment (and later the Wii Remote Plus), which looked the same as the Wii remote but could capture complex motion more accurately (in addition to the original accelerometer and sensor bar capabilities that could detect basic movements, it added gyroscopes that could detect nuances like the angle you’re holding the remote at and your wrist rotations). With Wii Sports Club, this greater precision is taken into account in the gameplay. It’s a thrill to rotate your wrists and see the trademark on your baseball bat or the angle of your tennis racquet smoothly rotate along with it.

I also liked how when two people are boxing locally, both of them can use two Wii Remote Pluses to give really precise control with both hands. You still have the option to use one Wii remote each as well, although support for the nunchuk has been removed.

There may be times the motion controls get stuck or out of sync, which can get frustrating. But they seem to anticipate this happening and provide instructions on the screen for how to reset your controller if it does (e.g., by putting it flat on a table, pressing the directional buttons, etc.)

I should say these “improvements” are not necessarily for everyone. There was a certain fun to having the controls be ridiculously basic so that all players of all ages competing against each other were more or less on the same playing field. Now, you really need to learn how to finesse things like the angle and trajectory of your tennis shot, the position and speed of your bat, or the angle of your bowling release. It takes a lot of getting used to the new controls, and admittedly I had some challenges with a couple of the sports at first. But with practice, you’ll get it.

4) New training modes: They’ve added more mini-games called “training mode”. Bowling has a game where you try to pick up spares, a game where you have to try to throw in a straight line, and everyone’s favorite, the 100-ping game. Tennis has a game where you need to hit tennis shots through…

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Another must-have game for your Wii U!, July 25, 2014

By 

Vdub (UT, USA) – See all my reviews

  

I’ve been a huge fan of the Wii Sports games ever since I first got my original Wii in 2006. While this release isn’t particularly groundbreaking, I would still consider it a must-have for anyone with a Wii U who doesn’t mind a little bit of physical interaction in their gaming. It’s another excellent first-party title from Nintendo and is making it that much easier to justify a Wii U purchase compared to the game drought the Wii U was experiencing a year ago.

*Wii Sports Club vs Wii Sports & Wii Sports Resort*

In a way, Wii Sports Club is basically an HD remake of the original 2006 Wii Sports. It has all the same five core games (more on those below) and none of the new games introduced in Wii Sports Resort. But the motion controls are vastly improved compared to the original, since they are requiring MotionPlus controllers now instead of the original Wii Remotes. Online multiplayer is also a new, much-needed feature.

The graphics are still very simplistic, which isn’t necessarily bad since it all fits the style of the series and doesn’t detract at all from the game. There are plenty of third-party sports games with “better” graphics if that’s what you’re going for, though I still find Wii Sports Club much more fun. On a lot of the games this time around, your Mii characters actually have legs, but still no arms (just hand spheres).

The “Club” in the title is basically alluding to the new club feature of the game, where you select a club to join before playing. The clubs are categorized by state (for US), province (for Canada) or country (for Central America). While you aren’t restricted to actually join the club that corresponds with your geographic location, I find doing so actually makes it quite fun so you can work as a very large team and compare stats to other regions. I’m in Utah so I joined the Utah club.

I found it quite interesting to see where others in my club/state perform. We have terrible tennis stats but decent bowling stats, for example. You can compare all kinds of metrics for each game (individually and as a club), such as online wins/losses, average bowling score, total pins knocked down, home runs, etc.

*Controls*
I know there have been a lot of people curious on how controls work on the Wii U and what types of controllers are supported, so hopefully I can clear up all the confusion.

Wii Remote (Original): Not compatible (unless a MotionPlus add-on is attached)
Wii Remote Plus: Compatible, and required for all games
Wii Classic Controller Add-on: Not compatible
Wii Nunchuck: Not compatible
Wii U Pro Controller: Not compatible
Wii U Gamepad: Compatible for 2 of the 5 games (more on this below). The other games just provide visuals/data on the gamepad with no actual interaction. During menus, the gamepad just displays “Please look at the TV screen.”

*The Games*

Tennis:
This one is very faithful to the original Wii Sports’ Tennis game. All the movements and controls should feel very familiar if you’ve played the old one, but are also intuitive and easy to pick up for new players. You’ll need plenty of room to move around to hit the ball, and then you basically swing the remote as you would a tennis racket. You can play singles or doubles, which makes it a great 2-4 player game. The backhands and general movements feel much more accurate than the original Tennis. As with every game (so I won’t be pointing it out again), you can also play online or one of various training modes, which are almost always more fun than the actual game.

Tennis Training Exercises:
Ring Master – Hit tennis ball through changing arrays of rings. Try for multiple rings in one hit for more points
Tennis Moles – Various moles pop up on the court of varying point values, aim for high point ones for highest score
Runner Ducky – Get points by hitting the ball far away from the duck. The more you can make him run, the more points you’ll get.

Bowling:
My personal favorite. Like tennis, it will all feel very familiar if you’ve played the original Wii Sports. Swing the remote and release B when you want to release the ball. They’ve added a manual/automatic release feature this time around though. If timing the B release is too difficult, you can switch it to auto and it releases it for you (much less fun that way personally, though it might be more fun for grandpa). By far, the most fun mode is 100-pin mode, where each frame has 100 pins to knock down. It a lot more challenging to get strikes there, but whether you hit 50 or all 100 pins, watching the physics and audio of them all flying/toppling over never gets old, along with the great replays. The only thing I don’t like about bowling is they always start your character 2/3rds of the way to the right of the lane instead of in the middle. Maybe that’s where the “pros” throw from, but I’d rather…

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