Game reviews: Wii Sports

Returning a volley, hitting a home run, or throw a knock out punch. Until recently you pressed a button to carry out these actions, not the most stimulating or realistic experience. Nintendo and Wii Sports plan to change all that. Requiring you to swing, punch, and throw your way to pro status.

Wii Sports is a compilation of 5 sports games, baseball, bowling, boxing, golf and tennis. And comes bundled with your purchase of a Nintendo Wii, therefore free (who doesn't like free stuff). This game was intended to introduce Nintendo's new controls, with quick and simple game play.

What Nintendo envisioned when the designed this game was something anyone could just pick up and play. Success of this vision can be see in Nintendo Wii sale numbers, just about sold out ever week for 14 straight months.

Watching your mom or grandma pick up the controls and go straight into playing some Wii Bowling or Wii Golf shows how easy playing Wii sports can be. The learning curve is about 2 seconds. What Wii Sports lack from is an amount of depth and some unresponsive controls.

Wii Bowling really demonstrates how well the Wii controllers can work. Want to put a little spin on the ball? Twist your hand like you would if you were at a real bowling ally and watch your ball come within inches of the gutter only to find its way back into the pocket.

Controls for Wii Sports are a not always perfect and can be a bit frustrating at times. Wii Boxing can be extremely frustrating, as it never seems to do what you want it to. You'll find yourself constantly, throwing jabs no matter what motion you make, and eventually lying on the canvas.

The Wii remote utilizes its built in accelerometer to gauge how fast you may throw a pitch or how hard you swing your golf club. In other words you don't have to throw your arm out for a 100mph pitch. A quick flick of your wrist will do the trick. This is useful for the lazy gamers to choose to take the easy way out of any form of exercise. (Yeah, you know who you are)

My biggest concern with Wii Sports is the lack of online play. Wii Sports was built to be a multiplayer game, a pretty darn good one at that. However, no online features is extremely disappointing.

Still, Wii Sports is an over all fun experience, for the whole family, and its free.

Game Play Score: 7/10

Easy for even the most inexperienced gamers to learn, so the next time you're playing Wii Sports be sure to give grandma some playing time as well. Some frustrating