Five Improvements for Wii Sports

Aug 3, 2007

Wii Sports is the only game that my family currently owns for use with our Nintendo Wii. As such, it gets a fair amount of play time around our house. Although it's a fun game, there are a number of areas that Nintendo could have greatly improved upon. Here's a short list of improvements that I've thought up for the game:

  1. Video Replays: When an exciting event takes place in the game, I'd like to be able to save a video snippet of what happened (a "play of the day" if you will). For example, I have hit two holes-in-one in golf over the past several weeks (a pretty exciting event, both times). Having a video replay would allow me to relive that exciting moment, and share it with others.
  2. Larger Golf Course: I really enjoy the golf game, but nine holes is just not enough. Why can't we have 36 holes, or better yet, 72? I can't believe the courses take up that much space, and I would guess that they are pretty easy to develop (given the basic building blocks).
  3. Bowling Tournaments: It would be fun to have some sort of bowling ladder available, where you could compete against either another individual or another team (either computer controlled or human). A handicapping system could even be provided, to allow weaker bowlers to challenge the seasoned pros.
  4. Improved User Settings: Every time one switches users during a game, Wii Sports asks you which handedness you prefer (right or left handed). Shouldn't I only set this once?
  5. Fix the Baseball Bug: When playing against the computer in baseball, the "home" team (the player) starts first (top of the inning), while the computer starts second (bottom of the inning). If the "home" team is ahead at the beginning of the last inning, the game ends via the mercy rule. I'm no baseball expert, but I know that the mercy rule only applies to the bottom of the inning! This should clearly be fixed.

If you own Wii Sports, what do you think? Are there other improvements that could be made?

3 Comments

kip

3:54 PM on Aug 6, 2007
I haven't broken out Wii Sports in a while, but in normal baseball the team on the top of the scoreboard, which bats first, is the away team. And to pick nits, a mercy rule is when you call the game when one team is up by some number of runs, even though the other team could theoretically come back (but probably won't). When the bottom of the 9th isn't played in real baseball it's because there's no point, but I'm not sure it could be called a mercy rule. So I guess what Wii Sports is doing is a type of mercy rule, but I don't think what actual baseball does constitutes a mercy rule. I may not play or watch sports much, but I grew up in a house where SportsCenter was on TV every day while I was eating breakfast, and an Atlanta Braves game was on TV most nights. So I know most of the rules (except of course the ones that have changed since I went to college). :)

Jonah

4:02 PM on Aug 6, 2007
Thanks for clarifying that. It is now even more apparent how little I know about sports.

Michael

6:08 PM on Sep 5, 2007
I think Wii Sports should have * online multiplayer abilities. * 4 player baseball * 5 frame bowling * at least 18 holes of golf * better sensitivity intelligence for golfing (putting very short distances is unnecessarily difficult, esp. for beginners) * dynamic cameras for split-screen tennis (to allow wide shots to be seen, rather than just clipped, i end up having to use my opponent's side of the screen all the time, and for beginners this can be a difficult trick to pull) * turn off auto-replays option (if i want to show someone who's never played video games the Wii (my fav people to show) I don't want them to be confused during (for example) tennis replays, they always try to swing during replays for fear of missing yet another hit it'd be awesome if there would've been volleyball. the fitness age thing should allow pausing and/or canceling if it's not going to allow us to play it more than once

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