wii sports resort bowling vs wii sports bowling

#WII SPORTS RESORT BOWLING VS WII SPORTS BOWLING PLUS#

Nintendo Switch Sports, on the other hand, feels complete, which I admit is a silly thing to say considering the damn online mode isn’t available yet. And in 2009, Wii Sports Resort felt like Wii Sports … just more. Its gameplay lacked depth and options half the sports minigames were duds and the art style was a rudimentary 3D setting with Miis instead of original characters. The original Wii Sports, for all its historical significance, felt like a novel but thin test of the Wii hardware. Nintendo Switch Sports isn’t so much a sequel to Wii Sports as it is the franchise’s overdue evolution from a tech demo into a proper video game. Nintendo, unsurprisingly, knows alchemy, certainly better than I do - and it has once again spun gold.

Bold choices!īut after sinking a week into its six minigames, I think I get the “classic Nintendo logic” of it all. So with all of that in mind - and I know, it’s a lot - why has Nintendo been so subdued? In an era of multiple Nintendo Directs dedicated to Animal Crossing or even Xenoblade, the company has given Switch Sports a brief announcement and a five-minute explainer video, then sent it to critics without the option to enter the main mode. In theory, there’s no better time for Nintendo to work its moneymaking magic. It debuts on the Nintendo Switch months after the hardware surpassed the Wii in total hardware sales, with a whopping 103.55 million Switches sold - and that’s amidst a global semiconductor shortage. But from that point forward, Wii Sports became little more than a reference in Super Smash Bros.Īfter more than a decade since that pop culture touchstone, I’ve finally had the opportunity to play a new entry: the aptly titled Nintendo Switch Sports.

#WII SPORTS RESORT BOWLING VS WII SPORTS BOWLING PLUS#

Nintendo shrewdly published Wii Sports Resort in 2009, alongside the Wii Motion Plus dongle that added some extra precision to the Wii’s motion controls. Was Wii Sports literally making the world more engaged, healthier, and smarter? Probably not! But this enthusiasm, spanning generations and professions, gets at how this one game touched nearly every corner of American pop culture.Ī decade ago, “more Wii Sports” sounded like a no-brainer. Another studied whether or not time with Wii Sports improved the skills of doctors performing laparoscopic surgery. Medical journals studied the potential benefits of Wii Sports bowling in nursing homes. Rainy day recess meant Wii Sports tennis in the classroom. In the mid-2000s, Wii Sports was the mainstream video game. People bought the Wii for Wii Sports, making it, for some, a $250 game. Wii Sports benefited from being bundled with nearly every Nintendo Wii, but the pair elevated each other into the rarified air of pop culture phenomena. For context, the recent Elden Ring has sold 12 million copies, and Animal Crossing: New Horizons, the game that consumed the early days of pandemic lockdown, has sold 37 million. Nintendo shipped nearly 83 million copies of Wii Sports. Surely, if any franchise deserved prioritization, this was it. And yet, I have been dumbfounded for the better part of 15 years by Nintendo’s decision to put one of its biggest hits of all time on the back burner. Nintendo only has so many internal studios and trusted partners, and only so much space in a year to release games without competing against itself.

This meager attention to franchises - franchises that other game publishers would make a deal with the devil to annualize - has more to do with practicality than stinginess.

I’m looking at you, F-Zero and Golden Sun and Wave Race and Earthbound.

Nintendo’s treasure box is so deep that it will go years, even decades, without creating a sequel for many of its hit franchises. Alchemy doesn’t exist, but Nintendo does.Īt any moment, Shuntaro Furukawa can greenlight a new Metroid or Animal Crossing or Zelda or 2D Mario or 3D Mario or Mario Kart or Mario Teaches Typing, and a few years from now, that decision will have produced the closest the entertainment industry has to a guaranteed profit.

Wii sports resort bowling vs wii sports bowling