There are a lot of games out right now, and even more games just around the corner. 2023 has had hit after hit, and I'm still making my way through some of them in the hopes of clearing my plate before the holiday deluge of games arrive. And yet, last weekend, I found myself playing 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Nintendo Switch Sports for over an hour. As I golfed and bowled and tennised, I was constantly lamenting what could have been. Nintendo Switch Sports shoul♌d have been an all-time classic, instead of already being forgotten.
Switch Sports is the successor to Wii Sports, which I believe to be one of the finest sports games ever made. Possibly the finest sports game ever made. Wii Sports might owe its astronomical sales figures to being packed-in with the Wii itself, but it has retained an iconic classic st🐷atus because it was unlike anything that came before. We had motion play in video games before Wii Sports, but it was the first to make the controller feel like an extension of your body. Between tennis, boxing, baseball, golf, and bowling, it offered five drastically different experiences and yet made them all feel seamless.
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Technically, Wii Sports already has a few sequels. Most obviously there's 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Wii Sports Resort, which added cycling, table tennis, sword fighting, jogging, basketball, and many more sports into the mix. There's also Wii Fit and Wii Fit Plus, which built on Wii Sports' idea that the Wii could be used for exercise and explored it in greater depth through fitness routines and yoga. But Nintendo Switch Sports felt closest to Wii Sports - it was a chance to launch fresh, to showcase how far technology had come, and to become the face of a new console. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:But it was a step backwards.
Nintendo Switch Sports launched with six sports, one more than the original Wii Sports. It added football (soccer), the world's most popular sport, my favourite sport, and probably the most difficult sport to integrate into a game like this - football has far more moving parts even at its most basic level than tennis. The fact the football is so competent and smooth in Nintendo Switch Sports is a major plus. But unfortunately, it's the only major plus.
The other five sports are tennis aౠnd bowling (two classics of the original), sword fighting (a popular import from Resort, now called chambara), plus the entirely new arrivals of volleyball and badminton. The problem here is not only the loss of baseball, boxing and golf - the latter of which has since arrived - but the overall lack of diversity. Tennis and badminton are far closer in relation than baseball is to anything here, and even volleyball uses a lot of similar elements to badminton in execution. It feels like admitting the tech is limited rather than showing us what it can do.
There's also nothing beneath the surface. In Wii Sports, as well as playing the actual sports, there were three different minigames per sport and a daily fitness regime that mixed them around. Switch Sports only has the actual sports themselves, and it doesn't even really have that - since all of the progress is tied to online play, you can't earn skill points to unlock tougher opponents like in the original either.
Resort managed to keep these minigames and added specific badge challenges to each of them, and it was dealing with far more sports. Switch Sports is so focused on online play it loses everything else, and even then it doesn't really work - if you play online with three friends, you can't make a four-man football team. You'll just be four people in a match paired up with strangers randomly.
Being online is probably why there's no baseball - it's too stop-start for a team game, so it just gets cut altogether. Boxing, table tennis, cycling, jogging, wakeboarding, basketball, and the rest? You figure it out. The one advantage Nintendo Switch Sports has is customisation, letting you unlock new outfits. But this is done in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:a strange seasonal battle pass system, and while it's at least free, it also 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:stops you from making much progress. In the first three weeks of launch, I cleared out that week's wardrobe and then all of the points I earned were thrown out next week, making me start from zero. When I went back a few months ago, two of the three wardrobes were already repeats of o𝕴nes I had. This time, they're all new, and I am needing to make a choice to commit to one and one alone. Letting me save coins for a storefront, even if it rotated daily to keep an air of chance and the appeal of new updates, would feel more rewarding.
The gameplay in Nintendo Switch Sports is🍌 excellent, particularly in the new arrival of football and the returning all-stars of tennis and bowling. When golf finally♑ arrived, it too felt better than ever. I like badminton well enough too, and assume chambara and volleyball have some fans. But the whole package adds up to a major let down. Nintendo Switch Sports is inches from greatness, but sport is all about the fine margins.