Of all the sports, golf has by far the most depth and content.

There’s skill involved, and it’s just enough to make it interesting without being too hard.

At first this can be awkward, especially if you don’t realise you can apply spin, but you’ll quickly get the hang of the controls and realise you can’t just swing your arm lazily and hope to get a strike. You can adjust the approach – from the left, right or middle – and aim of your bowl and apply spin to the ball by twisting the remote as you follow through. The basic movement is just as you’d expect, with you swinging through whilst holding down the A-button and letting go of it to release the ball. Once again, Bowling in Wii Sports is easy to master but also rather more nuanced than you might first imagine. As with tennis, baseball is intuitive and fun if you put a little time into mastering the timing of hitting the ball correctly.īowling is another of those sports that, even if you’ve never played it, you’ll have a vague to good idea of how it’s played. To most laymen these terms mean nothing, but this variety does add a suitable level of depth to the game. You also have the option of different types of pitches, with a splitter, curveball, screwball and fast ball all available by pressing certain buttons. These work just like you’d imagine: swing the remote at the right time to hit the ball and mimic a throwing action to pitch the ball. Rather like tennis, baseball only offers the fundamental pitching and hitting, with fielding dealt with automatically. Just like cricket, baseball is something of an acquired taste and the great majority on this side of the Atlantic will find themselves scratching their heads in puzzlement – or possibly boredom. Slightly less straightforward is baseball, though not necessarily because it’s any worse than the other Wii Sports games. It isn’t the deepest of the Wii Sports games – though that isn’t to say it’s shallow – but it’s the game that most people will immediately warm to. In short, tennis is exactly how you imagined it and is as fun as it looked when we saw it for the first time. There’s a surprising level of subtlety to the control too, with the ability to add topspin, slice and loft to your shots, adding further to rallies that can become very frenetic, especially when played with three friends. It already seems like an anachronism where Wii is concerned but tennis is simple and it’s fun, which is all Wii Sports wants and needs to be. The simple swing to hit the ball mechanic is by far the easiest to learn among all the Wii Sports games, and the automatic movement of the players allows you to concentrate on timing your shots. It seems suitable that this review begins with tennis, the original Wii Sports game that garnered all that intrigue at E3 earlier this year. Of all the early Wii titles, Wii Sports sells this idea best and it was an enlightened decision from Nintendo to pack it in with every console sold in Europe and North America.

When you watch people play on Wii, especially when playing Wii Sports, it looks like something you want to try, to see what it’s really like. Again, it looked fun it looked like something you’d want to play and this charm is Wii’s not so secret weapon. Nintendo repeated the trick at their European launch event, with Greg Rusedski and Tim Henman taking the stage to promote Wii Sports and the Wii experience.

They believed because they had to, because they’d seen Nintendo executives play tennis on stage and it looked a helluva lot of fun. Until recently their faith in Wii was just that, faith. “ It’s just a tech demo.“You may have seen those words written in various places, often followed by a tirade of abuse from Nintendo fans the world over.

Play wii sports golf