Wii Sports holds an important place in Nintendo history. It was the company’s best-selling software ever, permeated the culture in surprising ways, and its success helped rejuvenate Nintendo after a period of steady decline. It also kicked off one of the company’s largest and smallest franchises. While Nintendo’s subsequent sports titles never sold as well as the original Wii Sportsthey have become an essential part of each new console, a bit like a new Mario Kart Or Pokemon. And now the Switch 2 has its own version, Nintendo Switch Sports Stationand it’s the best one yet.
The core of the game is the same as always: offering you a number of sporting activities – they’re not exactly all “sports” – that require some form of motion control to play. That means swinging a Joy-Con controller to simulate using a tennis racket or throwing a bowling ball. There are 12 sports in total, and they vary a lot. Along with returning favorites tennis and bowling, mentioned above, are added things like skateboarding, thumb wrestling and piloting an airplane.
What makes the game work is its simplicity. Almost every activity is incredibly easy to master; I don’t know much about golf, but it only took me about a minute to understand the basics of swinging a club using a Joy-Con. This means that Sports station excels as an arcade-style experience, the kind of game you fire up when friends are over and you want to have some fun. Thumb wrestling is ideal for this. It’s so simple – you move your hand back and forth and use a single button to try to “pin” your opponent – and it becomes extremely intense and fun in the two-player competitive mode. And unlike IRL thumb wrestling, no one can actually cheat.
There are a few exceptions to the general simplicity. I always find basketball to be a bit too complex and I just can’t seem to find an effective strategy in table tennis. But there are enough games in Sports station that you’re almost certain to find a handful of favorites that you’ll stick with, so having a few duds isn’t the end of the world. There’s also decent depth, both in terms of the games’ skill ceiling – I spent hours trying to perfect the spin for my version of bowling – but also in terms of the different modes for each sport. Bowling, for example, includes the return option to play with 100 pins at once, which is as chaotic as it sounds.
But the biggest addition to Sports station is that it now takes place in an open world. This may seem strange for an arcade game collection, but it also allows it to introduce three new activities centered around exploring the beautiful island setting. There’s propeller plane (where you hold the Joy-Con like a paper airplane to fly), power cruise (where you hold two Joy-Cons horizontally, like the handlebars of a jet ski), and skateboard (where you use the Joy-Con’s mouse controls to simulate controlling a small skateboard). There are competitive ways to play these games, like a skateboard race, but I spent most of my time with a tourist mode where the goal is to find as many landmarks and secrets as possible across the resort within a five-minute time limit. It’s a bit like a more fleshed out version of free roam mode in Mario Kart World. The island is surprisingly detailed and interesting to explore, with many hidden caves and trails, and three modes of transportation allow you to experience it by land, sea, and air.
These exploration-focused modes add a new dimension to the experience, integrating seamlessly with more traditional sports while providing a very different vibe. I’m particularly drawn to skateboarding – there’s something very satisfying about pulling on the Joy-Con to simulate the push of a board – especially since you can collect items that allow you to buy new clothes and other accessories to customize your character.
One of the biggest keys to Nintendo’s success in the Switch era has been consistency. Even in the midst of a tumultuous time for the gaming industry as a whole, the company managed to produce a steady stream of games, many of which had a surprisingly long lifespan. Nintendo’s biggest hits aren’t always the ones you expect. The first Sports on Nintendo Switch has sold over 18 million copies, surpassing beloved games like Super Mario Bros. Wonder And Splatoon 3.
A little over a year into its existence, this perennial seller style is exactly what the Switch 2 needs, the kind of game people are picking up alongside it. Mario Kart when they buy a new console. Wii Sports showed how transformative a game like this can be, and Nintendo Switch Sports Station keep this mind quietly alive.
Nintendo Switch Sports Station will launch on Switch 2 on October 22.
Gn tech
