A game that managed to carry a good portion of my life.

Wii Sports has five different sports to choose from, baseball, tennis, golf, bowling and boxing. Each sport have very simple controls that even a baby could follow. For tennis, you just swing your Wii-mote like an actual tennis racket. For baseball, you just swing your Wii-mote like an actual baseball bat. Because of how easy and similar to real life the controls were, millions of families have been connected by this game, mine included.

Thank you Nintendo for this masterpiece of a game.

Wii Sports is many things.

One of the most important games of all time.

A showcase of a revolutionary new way that games could be controlled.

A game that can be played with anyone regardless of their familiarity with or affinity for videogames.

And a bit of a barebones pack-in game if we're being honest.

But putting that aside, I think you really do have to give it credit for being one of the only video games to ever have entire non-gaming families playing together all across the world. It's the ultimate casual game and it's worth noting over something like Wii Sports Resort because it represents the motion control fad at its peak.

That's right, motion control was a fad. Or was it? It's hard to tell, but we did learn one thing from the Wii era and that's the fact that many hardcore gamers don't like getting up from the couch and moving their arms to play games. It's true that those people would never use motion as their main method of control. However, I think others had the potential to be convinced, but were ultimately unimpressed by motion control as a concept. We might have to blame Nintendo for that.

Nintendo popularized motion control without showing the potential. They didn't include gyroscopes in the initial Wii remotes, making for an extremely limited execution of the motion control concept. Wii Sports was a worse game for not having compatibility with a Wii Motion Plus gyroscope. This is clear once you see the giant increase in quality with the motion control in games like Red Steel 2 and Wii Sports Resort. Maybe motion control would still be a popular method of play if the original Wii Sports had Wii Motion Plus support.

But then again, maybe motion control would have fizzed out eventually anyway. It's impossible to know. But given the fact that Wii Sports was many people's first and/or only experience with the Wii, I think we can both thank Wii Sports for popularizing motion control as well as blame it for relegating that control method to only be used with VR, Nintendo consoles, and gyro aiming for the forseeable future.

We are never getting Red Steel 3.

Simplicity at its finest. While this game is effectively a tech demo for the Nintendo Wii, it is not only a perfect showcase for this console's motion controls but also an enjoyable time with friends or even solo.

Each of the 5 games on display here utilizes motion controls slightly differently, with some games (Tennis and Boxing) being more fast-paced and kinetic, while the others (Baseball, Golf, and Bowling) are more methodical and slower-paced. All of these play well and are fun in their own right.

The biggest complaint is that they are all quite shallow content-wise. There is not much else to do if you don't like the 5 base games, however for what it is worth that was never the point of this title. It was a pack-in title for the Nintendo Wii to show off the console's features, and I believe it did that extremely well.

As a bundle compilation of how the Wii remote could be used, this does a great job. Everyone knows how these sports work in real life, and translating that into a game like remote really helped introduce people to the gaming like control scape, and really allowed for lots of people to experience games; even if alot of said games where not particularly "main stream." Beyond such however, Wii Sports is just really well put together, climbing the ranks to fight harder opponents, endlessly playing against freinds, and the many practice games make the game feel very complete, especially considering its bundle status. If anything, I would have liked more golf maps, but given how distributed all quality of all the games turned out to be, I can overlook it.