It’s been asked for a lot, but now it’s finally here: Wii Sports for Nintendo Switch. Even Switch Sports to be precise, because it’s not just a port of the game that helped make Nintendo’s Wii console so big. Time for a good nostalgia trip with a pinch of the future, because there are many reasons to jump for joy with this news.
Pure nostalgia
The first thing that comes to mind when we think of Wii Sports is, of course, those witty Mii dolls that became so famous thanks to the Wii. Your grandma became a Mii, you yourself probably changed your Mii every week and then there were all kinds of attempts to make Miis out of pets. The Miis steal the show in Wii Sports, because with them you play the sports. Wii Sports was also a standard game on the Wii, as it was intended to show people how to play with the device in motion. Ultimately, it proved that it could greatly help even grannies in retirement homes and people in rehabilitation centers (and get them playing!)
You can move again
Yes, because Wii Sports inspired gamers who would normally sit on the couch to get up and move. In 2006 we were all playing games in our living rooms. Of course you could also bowl and play tennis while sitting, because only your arm movements were registered, but it is just as much more fun when you stand and hit a lamp or the head of a fellow player. As long as that Remote (Wii’s controller) didn’t end up in the television…
New sports
Wii Sports offered a handful of sports, including bowling, tennis, boxing and golf. Tennis, bowling and chambara (sword fighting) are carried over from Wii Sports to Switch Sports, but new sports are also being added: football, badminton and volleyball, with golf later on. This time you don’t just use the remotes for gaming, but the Joy-cons from Switch, which also contain gyroscopes to register which movement you make. To play football, you also get a leg band with the game, so that those movements are also recorded.
Speedrunners and streamers can have their fun
You might not expect it to be one-two-three, but did you know that speedrunners love Wii Sports? Golf, in particular, is regularly speedrun and the fact that this is now making a comeback is of course great news for streamers and those looking to set a Guinness World Record to their name. Streamers can also play these gamers against others online, so you can expect fun collaborations. In short, this could just be the streaming game of the summer.
Switch is mature enough
The reason that a game like Switch Sports did not immediately appear, probably has everything to do with how Nintendo wanted to market Switch. At Switch, it was never the intention to get people moving or to focus on families. Wii was dismissed by many gamers as a ‘too casual’ game console and Nintendo probably didn’t want that fate for Switch. After all, Wii was thrown to death at one point with one bad ‘casual’ game after another. Logical, because Wii Sports, for example, was a great success and with 83 million units sold, it is still known as the best-selling Nintendo game. Fortunately, Switch is now mature enough after all these years (and even sold a lot), so that this step can now be taken without messing with the image of the device.
Switch Sports will be released on April 29, 2022: almost already.
Laura Jenny
When she’s not tapping, she’s floating somewhere in the wonderful world of entertainment or on a plane to some cool place in the real world. mario…
