At E3 we were able to play Tennis and Golf, so I wanted to try out a couple of the other games on display, and started with Bowling. The way you play was incredibly intuitive, yet had quite some depth to it as well. Essentially, the same movements that you'd make at your local bowling alley will serve you well in-game, from the swing to the follow through and release. You'll start by holding the controller up, and depressing the B button on the underside to indicate your grip on the ball. You'll then swing the controller back, just like you would on the lanes, and then swing forward and release. The speed and angle of your swing, and the timing of your release will all affect the quality of your game. We found that the game naturally adds some spin to the left for right-handed players, but you can overcompensate to counter-act this, or simply bear it in mind by setting your foot position to the right of center with the direction pad. We bowled a few strikes, left a couple spares, and overall had a very positive experience with what should be one of the most popular games in the package.
We then took our game to the diamond, and played a few innings in Baseball, just in time for the World Series. The Wii Sports version of baseball is a very simplified version of the game, where you control the pitching and the batting aspects of the game, with the AI stepping up to take care of the fielding. You won't have to worry about double-switches or rotating your infield, as this plays much more like a competitive Home Run derby game, only you're not getting tossed the same speed of pitch over the plate every time. The pitching motion was simple enough to get a grip on. You first select one of your four pitches using the A, B, or 1 and 2 buttons. Then you rear the controller back over your shoulder, and just tilt it forwards when you want to throw, with the speed of your movement directly influencing the speed of your pitch. The movement itself is very much like that of cracking a whip. Do it slowly, and you can toss an off-speed pitch in the 50 to 60 mph range. Really fast movements can give you 95+ mph fastballs.
The batting is as simple as it gets, but really gets you feeling like you're in the batter's box. Your little players, which look more like Russian Matryoshka dolls than athletes, hold the bat on-screen mimicking how you hold the controller. It was mentioned that it is important to keep the wrist strap attached, as more than a few controllers have already flown out of hands during heated game demos. If you like to swish the bat back and forth in the batter's box like Gary Sheffield, you can do so, with the controller position updating your bat position on-screen. The game then boils down to just making contact on the ball, and you'll get helpful updates when you whiff, telling you whether you swung too late or too early. Make contact, and it's either a home run, an out, a foul ball, or you can see the result of the play, determined by where the fielder was when they scooped up the ball. I hit a double, a pair of singles, and a pair of home runs in my first game, and I can see the long ball being a big part of the game, lending more weight to the home run derby comparison.
I'm looking forward to checking out Boxing, but as it requires the nunchuk attachment, it wasn't playable at the Nintendo Fusion Tour. We were told that the remote will control one hand, with the nunchuk controlling the other, and the controller's gyroscope being the key to relaying the player's hand movements to the game. While the sports games we've played in the package have all been quite simple, they've also been incredibly fun, and it's not hard to see these games being easy to introduce to the mass market that Nintendo is obviously focusing on. We'll have more on Wii Sports as soon as we can get our hands on it again, so stay tuned.
