Regardless of personal tastes or preferences, there's one game that everyone who picks up the Nintendo Wii at launch in the US will get, and that's Wii Sports. This is the game that Nintendo has chosen to include with its new hardware, and it makes for a pretty smart package. It's a collection of simple games based on the sports of tennis, baseball, bowling, golf, and boxing. It can admittedly be a little short on depth at times, so those looking for stunningly realistic renditions of these sports will need to look elsewhere. Wii Sports uses common, relatable activities to provide an example of how to create a tactile experience on the Wii. To this end, it's quite successful.

What immediately makes Wii Sports attractive is its ease of use. Each of the games shaves its respective sport down to a few essential elements and then has you pantomiming these basic activities with the Wii Remote--and in the case of boxing, the Nunchuk as well. For tennis, all you'll be doing is swinging the Remote as though it were a tennis racket. At the start of the match you'll flick the remote up to toss the ball in the air, and then with a quick swing you'll serve the ball. Depending on your handedness, swinging to the right or to the left will produce a forehand or backhand swing, while the game itself will move your player about the court. It generally does a good job of putting you in front of the ball, allowing you to focus entirely on your return, something that's determined by the shape and speed of your swing. You won't have pro-level, laserlike accuracy, and your timing governs most of your directional control. It's ideally either a two- or four-player game, though the artificial intelligence can facilitate a decent doubles game if you're on your own. You can choose from a one-off game, best of three, or best of five, and that's about it for tennis.

Baseball is reduced to batting and pitching, with all of the fielding handled on your behalf by the game. The motions are pretty analogous to the real thing, so you'll hold and swing the remote as though it were a baseball bat. You'll see your batter waving the bat over his shoulder as you do the same with the remote, but you don't need to worry about your strike zone, just the timing and speed at which you swing. There's a little more to pitching, which relies on an over-the-shoulder, down-and-forward motion to emulate your standard big-league overhand pitch, and the speed of this gesture will determine the speed of your pitch. You can add a little mustard by holding the A button to produce a curveball, the B button for a screwball, or both for a splitter. You can affect the direction of the ball using the D pad before your pitch, though the game doesn't give great feedback as to how high, low, inside, or out the pitch will be. Again, it's a better experience with two players, but it's still pretty good against the AI. It's most fun in short bursts, so the fact that the games are limited to three innings seems like a good thing.

Bowling is perhaps the most nuanced of the games included in Wii Sports and generally comes across as the most intact sport of the five, with just the right amount of technicality. You'll start off holding the remote in front of you pointing straight up, then you'll move it down, back, and forward again. You'll hold the B button as you swing, and when you let go, your player will release the ball. Like with a real bowling ball, any twist in your wrist as you swing will give your ball some spin. And, like with a real bowling ball, you can counteract spin by moving your player's starting position to the left or right, as well as your angle of attack, before you throw. Up to four players can play a full 10 frames here, and the fact that your success isn't governed by interacting directly with others somehow makes bowling especially accessible.

The actual sport of golf is one of restraint, which is definitely the focus of Wii Sports' take on it. Swinging the remote as though it were a golf club basically emulates the old rising power meter that was once standard in all golf video games. You'll see an onscreen power meter that goes higher the harder you swing. There are dots at regular intervals on the power meter that correspond with the dots on your ball's projected path in an onscreen minimap so that figuring out how hard you need to swing is mostly a simple matter of determining which dot you need to swing to. Of course, you'll have the winds to contend with, and there's the ball's bounce and roll to be considered as well. While it can be tempting to just grip it and rip it when you're making your way up the fairway, if you swing so hard that you go past the top of your power meter, you'll slice or hook the shot. Putting works similarly, though with a much more subdued motion. As natural as the swing can feel, it's a little contrived, and you'll see that you can continue to give the power of an underpowered shot a little bump by continuing to raise the controller up and forward after the ball has already left the ground. There are only nine different holes of golf, which start off as straight shots and dog-legs and end with an interesting hole that spans a small archipelago. We found the swing to be a little fussy at times, but not so much that we didn't wish there were more holes to play through.

Boxing is the only Wii Sports game that uses the Nunchuk attachment. You'll control your fighter's stance, blocking, and punches by holding the remote and the Nunchuk and moving them accordingly. Holding them right in front of you will block, and you can also dodge punches by swaying forward, back, and side-to-side. Boxing can be the most physically exhausting game of the five, since swinging your fists causes your fighter to do the same. You'll need to aim high and low with your actual swings if you want to hit your opponent specifically in the head or body. Since only the Wii Remote interacts directly with the movements onscreen, the position of your off hand is at least loosely tied to it, making it difficult to distract your opponent with an uppercut with one hand while you try to sneak in a body blow with the other. The game goes split-screen when you're up against a live opponent, and matches seem to always end in a knockout, so you don't need to sweat the judges.

Despite their relative simplicity, there's still a learning curve to the games in Wii Sports, and a training mode is included that not only serves to help you hone your skills, but can be a fun challenge for those who've already got a handle on the games. There are three different activities for each sport, and they focus further on specific aspects of the game. For example, in tennis you'll be challenged to return as many consecutive, relentless serves as you can without missing. Baseball has you competing in a home run derby. Bowling has you working on using spin to your advantage by placing barriers strategically in the lane. Golf will challenge you to make it to the green in a single shot from a variety of positions. Boxing tests your power against a series of punching bags that you need to knock clean off their chains.

It's in the training mode, though, that you'll probably discover that you don't need to perform big, sweeping motions in a few of the games to play well, which is too bad, since it seems a little counter to the notion of the package. Another way Wii Sports keeps you coming back is with a daily fitness test. Here you'll participate in a random series of training mode challenges, and based on your performance you'll be assigned a fitness age, a none-too-subtle nod to the Brain Age test in Nintendo's DS puzzle game of the same name. It worked in Brain Age, and it seems to work well in Wii Sports, too.

Wii Sports is the first Wii game that uses the Mii, a digital avatar that you can create and customize from the console's Wii Channel interface. These figures, which look a bit like further simplified versions of Playmobil people, populate Wii Sports, and they set the tone for the look of the game. The environments aren't as overtly abstracted, but their look is simple and clean, something that comes across on both standard and progressive scan displays. The sound follows suit with simple, crisp effects, and though it's perhaps not as striking, it does make nice, mostly underplayed use of the Wii Remote's speaker.

The first time the games included in Wii Sports were shown to the public, it was simply as tech demos to prove that Nintendo wasn't totally crazy for building a whole console around motion-sensitive controls. Though there's still kind of a tech-demo feel to Wii Sports, it's a fun, unique package you'll enjoy so long as you don't expect too much detail from it.

Wii Sports is a great example of the kind of immersive control we can expect from future Wii software, but the game itself is incredibly basic.

If you ask Nintendo about its new-generation home console, Wii, it’ll tell you that its goal with the console is to get mom, dad or anybody in your household – or the world, for that matter – that doesn’t normally play video games to play the console. From the console’s more approachable $250 price tag to its intuitive controller design, the whole concept behind Nintendo’s latest system is introducing more people to video games.

Perhaps that’s why the Big N saw it so important to include Wii Sports in the North American and UK launch packages for free. After all, the title is incredibly simple and explaining the controls for it is about as simple as explaining how you’d play the same sport in real life. In other words, if you know how to play any of the sports in Wii Sports in real life, then you’ll know how to play their Wii Sports counterparts. This goes for mom, dad, your aunt and even your grandma and grandpa. Indeed, Wii Sports is a game that anybody in your family can pick up and play. But while this statement couldn’t be any truer, Wii Sports is a bare-bones and tech-demo-esque game that doesn’t offer much outside of multiplayer party sessions.

The Rundown

* Wii Sports Tennis

* Wii Sports Baseball

* Wii Sports Golf

* Wii Sports Bowling

* Wii Sports Boxing

* Motion-sensing controls for all sports games included, as seen above

* Up to four-player multiplayer

* Does not support online play

* Comes free with every Wii purchased in North America and Europe

5 Sports for the Price of None

Wii Sports comes packaged with five different sub-games: Tennis, Baseball, Golf, Bowling and Boxing. These are the names of each game, as you will see them on the title’s slick menu when you boot up the game. Wii Sports itself comes free with every Wii package sold in North America and Europe, and that move by Nintendo seems to have been a great one – for a number of reasons (one of which is more negative than positive). We’ll get the bad out of the way first. Wii Sports itself is exceptionally basic. While this isn’t necessarily a bad thing for everyone, other sports games – those produced by Electronic Arts, most notably – run circles around Nintendo’s pack-in game when it comes to depth and lasting appeal. If you’re looking for a sports game that will offer lots of things to unlock and a deep single-player experience, you won’t find it in Wii Sports.

That said, it doesn’t really matter, because Wii Sports is all about being a pick-up-and-play game whenever you need one. If you’re looking for a game that’ll be the highlight of your party, this could very well be it (depending on who you’re partying with, that is). Between hardcore gamers and people who have never touched a game controller, you’d be hard pressed to find someone that didn’t smile at least once during their first game of Wii Sports Tennis, for example. Even the most hardcore Wii-doubters will enjoy the fun control scheme Wii Sports offer. And meanwhile, non-gamers will find themselves playing a video game for the very first time. We know -- we’ve seen it firsthand.

As said before, there are five sub-games included in Wii Sports. You can easily access each game from a nicely-designed menu screen, and from there on out, you can choose how many people you want to play with. Each game also features an option screen, where you can choose to change the settings for things like what hand you prefer to use (left or right) and more. Additionally, there are training modes for all sports, which can help improve anyone’s skill at the game. The game's training mode is surprisingly fun and beats playing single-player by yourself, although multiplayer is more fun. There is even a health mode, where your Wii Sports age is determined by how well – or badly – you play, and the game even keeps track of that information so you can brag to your friends about how young and fit you are.

Before we move onto discussing the individual games in Wii Sports, there’s one last general subject to touch on: the fact that Wii Sports is the first of what we hope will be many games to include support for your Mii characters (virtual characters you design on your Wii and are saved to your Wii-mote). What this means is that you can play as your very own Mii in each game in Wii Sports. More importantly, if you’re logged in as your own Mii, all your stats will be saved to it, allowing you to look back at a full list of stats and information whenever you want. Of course, if you don’t want to, you can play Wii Sports as a guest, but no stats will be saved.

Wii Sports Tennis

Wii Sports Tennis is debatably the best sports game in the Wii Sports package. Hardcore Nintendo fans will remember that wonderful Tuesday morning in May 2006 that Nintendo held a media briefing in Hollywood, California, unveiling to the world the Wii and along with it several new games for the system. During the one-hour show, Nintendo kicked it into high gear when it demoed Wii Sports Tennis, where four people – including famed Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime and Mario-creator Shigeru Miyamoto – played a multiplayer game of Wii Tennis on stage for the world to see.

Playing Wii Sports Tennis with your friends and family is just as fun as it looked for the Nintendo gang on stage during that E3 media briefing – although we know some of our readers would much rather play alongside Reggie and Miyamoto than mom and dad.

Up to four can play tennis in Wii Sports, and you can even play multiplayer using one or two Wii-motes and passing them around to one another. Control for the game is incredibly simple and easy enough to grasp for anyone – including those who have never played a video game in their life. Your Mii character is on auto-control and runs back and forth depending on where the tennis ball is coming in from. The only thing you control in Wii Tennis is the movement of your tennis racket, which is done by swinging the Wii-mote. The game doesn’t feature 1:1 control, so you aren’t getting an experience that perfectly matches real-life tennis, but the game generally does a good job of detecting how you swing the Wii-mote and in what direction you do so.

Although the reasoning behind why Nintendo opted not to allow you to control your Mii itself is understandable, we can’t help but feel that it’d be nice if there was an option to do so with either the nunchuck or D-pad on the Wii-mote. Thankfully, it’s still fun – especially with a group of people – to simply play a game of back-and-forth tennis by swinging your hands around to hit the ball back and forth. Occasionally, the Wii-mote does a poor job of detecting how you moved it, and as a result, something unexpected happens on screen, but these moments are rarely a major problem. And the unfortunate truth is they’re present in every Wii Sports title.

Wii Tennis is one of our favorites in the game, and if nothing else, it gets us excited about the future of Wii and what future tennis games will play like on the console. Indeed, it is a great example for developers looking into creating such Wii software.

Wii Sports Baseball

By holding the Wii-mote away from you just like a bat on a real baseball field and swinging it to hit the incoming pitch, Wii Sports Baseball automatically creates an experience that’s more immersive than any other baseball game we’ve played. Up to four can play Wii Baseball, and the more that play the merrier (as is true with every Wii Sports title, actually). Even better, you only need two Wii controllers to play Wii Baseball, as you take turns passing them around as it is people’s turns to bat. One Wii-mote is always required for pitching, however.

There are two parts to every Wii Baseball game: batting and pitching. The former, as we just described, is incredibly intuitive. In fact, it doesn’t get much easier than this, although we’ve noticed that actually hitting a ball isn’t as easy as understanding how to do so. Control for the positioning of where you hold your bat is almost perfectly synced with the Wii-mote. If you point the Wii-mote slightly up, your Mii character will follow suit. If you point it down, though, it’ll do the same. What’s more, depending on how hard and fast you swing the Wii controller, your Mii character will do the same thing in game. The only problem with this, though, is it is difficult to judge exactly how hard you should be swinging your controller most the time.

Pitching is also easy. With the Wii-mote, you motion throwing either a fast or slow ball, and your character will execute the same pitch. While pitching can be lots of fun, our main complaint is that the Wii controller doesn’t seem to detect accurately how hard or soft you pitch, which results in only two kinds of balls: fast and slow. This is somewhat of a disappointing truth. Between the two, batting seems to have been pulled off better in Wii Sports, which makes it more fun than pitching.

Wii Sports Golf

Although at E3 it was overly simple, the final version of Wii Golf seems to be the deepest of all games in Wii Sports. Talk about irony.

Up to four gamers can golf, and they can take turns using one Wii-mote, so Wii Golf’s multiplayer goodness is available from the get-go, unlike most games in Wii Sports. Golf uses the same motion-sensing control scheme present in every other game in the package, and it works great here. Wii Golf is one of the games in the series that is best played standing up, although it is definitely possible and doable to play sitting down. You hold the Wii-mote as if you were holding a club on a real golf course. The Wii-mote recognizes how quickly or slowly you swing the remote, and it translates your efforts in-game pretty accurately. Obviously, when you’re putting, things are more sensitive. Just like Wii Baseball, putting in Wii Golf is made extra difficult by the fact that it’s hard to have a sense of just how hard you should be swinging.

Before swinging your club, you can carry out as many practice swings as you want. Only when you hold down the A button does your Mii move in close enough to the ball to hit it. Practice swings are great, as the game’s courses feature randomly generated wind speeds and directions, so you’ll definitely want to get a feel for how hard or soft you want to swing the Wii-mote before you actually do so. What’s more, you can switch between different clubs, depending on how long or short you want to hit the golf ball.

While it’s tough to write that Wii Golf is problem-free (there are some tiny problems with how the Wii-mote translates your swings into in-game swings), Wii Golf is definitely the deepest of the games in Wii Sports. The thought of Mario Golf on Wii makes us happy after having played Wii Sports Golf.

Wii Sports Bowling

In Wii Bowling, you hold the Wii-mote just like you would a bowling ball. In order to roll it down a bowling lane, you put the Wii-mote up towards your chest, swing it downwards behind you and then swing it forwards, releasing it upon the pins you seek to strike down. There’s a little more depth to Wii Bowling, too, as depending on exactly how you’re holding the Wii-mote, the ball will roll in a different direction. For example, if you’re holding it slightly crooked to the left, the bowl will lean left, as it would in real bowling. As far as depth goes, you can also move your Mii character to the left or right of the lane with the D-pad, thus you aren’t always stuck smack dab in the center of it.

Anywhere between one and four can play a game of Wii Bowling, and even better, you can play with up to four with just one Wii-mote by simply passing it around to each other. Like every Wii Sports game, bowling by yourself isn’t nearly as fun as bowling with your friends.

Also like the other games within Wii Sports, it’s very much possible to cheat while playing Wii Bowling by doing fast motions with the Wii-mote and not following the game’s directions. Unfortunately for bowling fans, though, there seems to be a glitch in the game that allows you to get a strike every time. Of course, if you choose to play the game the way it’s meant to be played, this won’t be a problem. And anybody who cheats in Wii Sports – Wii Bowling or otherwise – will also be cheating themselves of the fun they could be having if they would just play fair.

Wii Sports Boxing

When Nintendo first revealed it at its New York City Wii Preview event this year, Wii Sports Boxing simultaneously caught us by surprise and excited us at the same time. However, the final game doesn’t play nearly as well as it sounds like it might. Don’t get us wrong – it is still fun, especially once you get the hang of it. But, overall, due to its controls, it’s probably our least favorite of the bunch.

First of all, Wii Boxing is the only game in the compilation that requires both the Wii-mote and nunchuck to be played. Imagine, if you will, both pieces of the Wii controller duo acting as your virtual hands. The nunchuck represents your left hand while the Wii-mote acts as your right. From here, you can probably guess how the controls work. By swinging both around, you can punch your opponents, and the control is 1:1, so everything you do in real life translates into the game. Further, you can also lift both the nunchuck and Wii-mote up in front of your face to cause your Mii to do the same in the game, blocking opponents from landing any looming sucker punches. When blocking with both controllers, you can even motion left and right – moving your head with them, as if you were dodging in a real boxing match – and your Mii will follow suit.

Sounds fun, right? Well, it is, to a degree. But the controls in Wii Boxing feel decidedly wonky, and it’s more common than not that both players are lost, swinging their hands mindlessly in the air trying to get their in-game character to land a punch. The best element of control, really, is the blocking and dodging system, which makes the punching system look pale in comparison.

Final Word

Packaging Wii Sports with every Wii in North America and Europe was an incredibly smart decision by the Big N. There are essentially two reasons for this. The first is that it’s an ideal game to demonstrate both how you play Wii and the potential of the console. The first thing I did when I played Wii Sports was show my family the game. Eventually, even my dad gave the game a try, and guess what: he loved it. He was smiling, laughing and most importantly for Nintendo, he was playing a video game – the very thing the Big N wants.

The second reason it was smart for Nintendo to package the title for free isn’t exactly a compliment to either Nintendo or Wii Sports itself. Disappointingly, Wii Sports probably isn’t worth purchasing for most people. As a single-player game, it’s unsophisticated, simple and has virtually no lasting appeal. Moreover, the lack of online play is a real letdown. More likely than not, hardcore gamers will be done with Wii Sports in just a few days, as far as playing by themselves goes.

But it’s when you boot up multiplayer and have your friends, family and whoever you want join in that Wii Sports transforms from the most straightforward sports game out there to possibly the most fun. The bottom line, really, is that Wii Sports, as a multiplayer game, is downright fun. Whether your thing is tennis, baseball, golf, bowling or boxing, you’re bound to be smiling – at least for a few seconds – while playing Wii Sports.

Wii Sports is free, but that doesn’t mean it’s not fun.

Never lose skill points:

After losing a match in tennis, baseball, or boxing, immediately press Home before the game displays "You lose". Then exit to the Wii menu. If timed correctly, when you reenter the game your skill level in that sport should not have decreased.

Baseball: Pitch underhand:

While pitching, press 2 before throwing. To return to a normal delivery, press 1.

Baseball: Perfect throw:

When pitching just flick your wrist to get a perfect throw.

Baseball: Pitching combos:

While pitching hold A for a screw ball, hold B for a curve ball, or hold A + B for splitter.

When pitching, flick your wrist as if you were throwing a curveball and you will throw a hard fastball.

Baseball: Easy homeruns:

To hit a baseball out of the park swing with as much power as possible. Time your swing just right and you will hit it out of the park.

Baseball: Home Run training session gold medal:

To get a Gold Medal, hit every ball pitched to you out for a home run. You must do this ten times or you will not get the gold medal.

Baseball: Ground-rule double:

If you hit a baseball and it bounces into the stands, it will be a ground rule double.

Bowling: Extra pins:

When aiming for the pins in the first aiming thing, move all the way to the far right or left. Then depending on which direction you aimed the first one, aim the second one as far as you can go in the same direction. Your target will be in another lane.

Bowling: Alternate ball color:

When starting a game of Bowling, hold the D-pad in one of the following directions to change the color of your bowling ball. Press Up for blue (default color), Left for pink/red, Down for green, or Right for gold.

Bowling: Star Ball

If you get your Skill Level to 1,000, your ball will become heavier and no matter what color, it will have a bunch of stars on it. (This looks really cool when the ball spins!)

Bowling: Training Power Throws:

When on the "final lane" of Power Throws, move all the way to the right (or left, depending on which hand you use). Turn toward the wall two to four notches then release the ball on top of the wall. If done correctly, the bowling ball will travel down the top of the wall past the pins, and all 92 pins will fall down at once.

Bowling: Training mode picking up spares gold medal:

Knock down the pins with a single throw. Twist your wrist to curve the ball. If you knock down all the pins on seventeen lanes you will earn a gold medal.

Bowling: Training mode picking up spares platinum medal:

Knock down the pins with a single throw. Twist your wrist to curve the ball. If you knock down all the pins on all twenty Lanes you will earn a platinum medal. REMEMBER: Lane 20's pin is only a single pin and will be easy to pick up.

Scare Crowd in Bowling:

To scare the crowd while bowling, start the regular motion for bowling and let go on the backswing. The ball will fly backwards and the crowd will scream and jump.

Boxing: Blocking Attacks:

Hold Wiimote in front of face to block high attacks.

Hold Wiimote in front of stomache to block low attacks.

Golf: No maps or meters on screen:

Hold 2 when making a choice at the course selection screen. The power meter, map, and wind speed indicator will no longer appear.

Golf: Reading the green:

While on the green, press 1. You can see a detailed view of the green from where the level of the green changes.

Tennis: Alternate court color:

When starting a game of Tennis (or immediately after choosing "Start Over" on the Position Select screen), hold 2, The tennis court will become blue.

Tennis: Super serve:

When you are serving, just when the ball is at the highest point quickly flick your wrist. You will see white smoke from the ball and it will be difficult to hit. This may require some practice.

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