Oh I remember this. Move the sofa. Push back the chair. And then every game started with something that took me back almost 40 years ago, music and sports at baby school. Find a spot, stretch out your arm, and make sure you don’t bump into anything and don’t knock anyone over. are you ready. Just thinking about it is enough to bring back the smell of every school hall that has ever existed: floor polish, dust, feet.
But that’s not what it smells like. This smells of canned wine and company perfume wafting from hidden vents. This will smell marshmallow, candied fruit and sandalwood. In fact, it’s one of the biggest surprises for Nintendo Switch Sports. At least for me. How beautiful it is all.
The latest game in the Wii Sports series features six games, three new games, and three returning games, which might seem a little too thin on paper, even if you factor in the golf free update in the fall. All this is known in advance. What I didn’t notice, however, was that the game played out in a sort of idealized urban campus, with each sport for its own reasons.
I’m already obsessed with these reasons. From the stairs and the exposed brick chambara pool – I always see an old lady standing on the gantry cheering me up whenever I hit my opponent in the water – to the badminton game To the hopeful Boxpark, all this Nintendo Switch Sports is like working for Google or one of those crazy tech companies where they do laundry and serve up hot lobster on your desk every night.
My favorite space is volleyball. If you take your eyes off the court for a second – always dangerous in volleyball – you’ll see a multi-layered glass-fronted coffee shop Stroke Library called Cafe Humhum. It’s the stuff of dreams. A coffee shop, but also a library—the quiet murmur of the shelves and the clink of the cutlery. The work of a design team that can’t help but incorporate a bit of world building into a series of sports games.
I should probably go to a sports game. In fact, volleyball is the ideal place to start. Here’s one of my six favorite dead ties—a clever twist on a time-focused squeaky classic. Serve, hit, set, spike, block: all with the same motion controls, really – flip the Joy-Con. But timing is what makes it a bloody sport. It’s a Switch Sports game that will make you scream for victory when you hear a bouncing THWACK that means your opponent missed the ball.
It’s fine as a single player, but online, with, say, four players, it’s definitely a riot. This is brutal. Who knew timing games would make you so angry? Who knew putting yourself in the right position, hitting the ball and seeing it turn green – which means perfect timing, I think – could bring such an angry joy? volleyball!
Soccer is another favorite of mine – along with badminton, it’s another of three new games from Switch Sports. Soccer is great no matter how you play it: it’s Rocket League football, really, played with a giant ball on the field with walls to keep the ball in play. The ideal way to play it is online with two full four-player teams, with chaos and punishment. But it works well as a single player: move with one stick, aim the camera with the other, pass, nudge, swipe the Joy-Con to kick, then swipe with both to perform a hilarious all-or – No dive head.
It works because it’s fun to play with the ball, see it approach you with some majesty, a towering thing that could easily squash you, and redirect it with a quick lunge. The more players there are on the field, the more likely this will stop being football and become a fantastic pinball machine – but even that works. And online, if the team knows what they’re doing, you get proper play, passing is important, goals are more than three or four. The only thing I’d say is that the shootout mode, which lets you strap the Joy-Con to your lap and actually kick the ball, feels a little novel. It’s fun to see the goals get smaller as the score goes up, but ultimately it’s not something I want to play regularly.
Badminton, the third in the new sport, is a lighter, faster version of tennis that sticks to singles. The rally is good and easy to get, but it’s really about reading the shuttlecock and waiting for the error – an opponent who isolates himself on one side of the court, or the moment when the shuttlecock swings in the air instead of actually flying, which is done with a power shot invitation to things. Badminton is fast, which means you can sit there for hours and chug off your opponents – or let them chug you. This is cute stuff. Yes, Box Park adds to the charm.
After that, three returning sporting events took turns — until golf came along. Tennis is the ever-reliable doubles game, if you’re singles your partner will imitate your moves, but that’s thanks to four players – ideally four players who have just had a real-world feud and want to There is a safe space to unravel things.
Tennis feels heavier when badminton is added to the lineup, but it’s still a wonderful fast version of the sport that captures the frantic slam of a rubber ball breaking the sound barrier (I know it doesn’t, but it feels like it does), and when other things will undoubtedly become an option when the novelty of it dissipates. I love how grumpy the players are – when they lose a point they have Peanuts speechless angry graffiti on their heads and you can see them arguing on replays. When I lose, I’m a little grumpy myself. I once read that the founder of Uber is number two in Wii tennis in the world. It makes sense. This is a game of sharks.
All that said, Chambara, which is actually more violent, because you hit people with a sword, actually feels less violent. This one-on-one game is another joy of online play, there are always a lot of new people to face, but it also works well when there are only two friends in the living room. Motion controls are great, in part because you recalibrate after each game by pointing the Joy-Con at the screen, and the three playstyles on offer allow things to go from very simple bashing and defense (defense is done with a trigger , and allows you to stun your opponent and create an opening) to a mode where your guard charges, and a final mode where you use both swords. I’ve played a few dual sword games online against people who really didn’t screw up. It can be very exciting to see a new enemy appear and see exactly what they are doing from the way they move their swords.
(I also love Nintendo’s Chambara extras – the whole thing apparently takes place in a converted rail shed, with exposed brick and vaulted ceilings, and a courtesy little ladder from the pool where you’re bumped into and back Litong comes out to the platform you play on – lovely world building I suspect other teams will forget.)
The last sport to return is bowling, which is as enjoyable as ever. Shake the Joy-Con to the bowling ball and don’t forget the wristband because people have smashed their TVs.
There are two things I’ll mention about bowling, I’ll say it briefly because I’m running a lot: there’s an extra mode where you have obstacles in the lanes and moving platforms, which I don’t really like, but could be Because I’m not good at it – my daughter loves it. Then there’s the online game, where 16 players compete at the same time in a dizzying array of games, with the player with the lowest score after each round being eliminated. It’s a rush to see a lot of players join matchmaking — a real rush — but after playing a lot of games, I also suspect that many of those players are bots. Hopefully that’s just because it’s still early days.
Online is fun, I think: All games benefit from it, but I’m also having fun playing locally until reviewers can use online. Part of me believes this series will always be a local game, which is probably why you can only earn items for your Sportsmates avatar – they are more charming than I expected, with a hint of Animal Crossing on their faces, plus you can still Import the weird Mii by playing online and leveling up. It must be said that this is a less generous system with slow leveling up and then randomizing what you get as you choose a pack of items and the game then chooses a specific item for you.
At the end of the day, though, these games are so polished, with such an odd coffee shop and library charm, that it doesn’t matter how you play them. My daughter is getting to the age where she completely misses the Wii, so when this new game came and we started moving furniture, she didn’t know what we were doing. But that afternoon, we must have been playing together for hours, and she needed a break when the diving header animation made her laugh. The whole thing is intoxicating.
