That’s how I know Nintendo Switch Sports is a good party game: I hate my friends now.
It’s one thing to lose a typical local multiplayer game, a smashed or Soul Calibur or what do you have. It’s quite another thing to keep getting beat the lights out of your body with a foam sword just because one of your friends is “trained in martial arts” and is “pretty good” at that kind of stuff. Or sitting there and watching in seething amazement as another friend – beer bottle in one hand, Joy-Con in the other – bowls 13 strikes in a row her first game ever. Or trying to hit a volleyball and then… tripping, falling flat on your face and losing the point.
Yes, you can stumble into it Nintendo Switch Sports– or at least I can.
Nintendo Switch Sportsout today for the console, which is the name of the game, is in every way the successor to Wii sportsWhich came packaged with Nintendo’s 2006 console, becoming a culturally dominant force in the process. As with its predecessor, you use movement controls to participate in mini-games based on IRL competitive sports. Six activities are currently available: tennis, volleyball, badminton, soccer, bowling and a sword fighting competition called Chambala.
Continue reading: How to make a Mii for Nintendo Switch Sports
To play these sports you have to more or less repeat the movements that you would do in the real versions of these sports with the controller in hand. You throw the Joy-Con to roll a ball down the lane in bowling games. You swing it to hit the ball over the net in tennis (or whatever the projectile is called in badminton). In most sports, your character appears to automatically move toward the ball, so making contact is just a matter of timing. The learning curve is practically horizontal here.
That’s not knocking switch sports. In fact, the low barrier to entry does exactly what it does: you don’t have to spend time explaining the rules or giving newbies getting started tips. You just give them a Joy-Con, point to the one in-game button (it’s the trigger on the Joy-Con), and pop them.
The lonely puzzle here is Chambala, which pits you and another player against each other on a small platform in the middle of a pool. Your goal is to slam your opponent to the edge of the platform and knock them into the water below. The best two out of three win. But there is a twist! By holding down the trigger on your Joy-Con you can block. If an enemy swings at you vertically and you block horizontally, they will be stunned, giving you a few seconds to land hits. But if you block horizontally, they still land a hit. (The opposite logic applies to horizontal swings.) The result is a game that, while requiring some physical movement, is just as much a duel of intelligence. It’s all first-person, too, with local matches played in vertical split-screen. One could easily see that Chambala was successful in virtual reality.
But the more well-known sports can also provide a similar thrill. Volleyball, for example, seems to be the most difficult, as two teams of two players serve without the miserably screwed up tennis rules. My friends and I organized a small tournament. At the end of the last game, both of our teams had 4 points on the board. The ball raced toward my team’s side. I had my Joy-Con ready, ready to knock them back.
And then my character was planted in the face. I do not know why. But it was funny AF.
Over the next few weeks, observers will no doubt be making a lot of hay over whether or not Nintendo Switch Sports is a worthy successor. After all, it has some huge footprints to fill. Wii sports was not just a game – it was a systemic phenomenon that permeated the culture. (fun stats: Wii sports sold more copies than anyone’s population single country in Europe except Germany.) The switch itself recently passed the Wii in terms of total sales and is in the middle arguably his greatest year to date. Comparisons abound.
Honestly, I couldn’t care less about all of these things. I just want to have fun with my friends. So far, in this regard, Nintendo Switch Sports is a hole in one. Well, until golf mode will be released later this year and my friends invariably start scoring real holes in one. Then they can all screw themselves.
