Gameplay
Wii Sports consists of five separate sports games—tennis, baseball, bowling, golf, and boxing—accessed from the main menu. The games use the motion sensor capabilities of the Wii Remote and Nunchuk attachment to control the actions of the on-screen character. The player moves the remote in a similar manner to how the separate games are played in real life; for example, holding and swinging the Wii Remote like a golf club, baseball bat or bowling ball. Some aspects of the gameplay are computer controlled. In tennis, player movement is controlled by the Wii, while the swinging of the racket is controlled by the player. Baseball consists of batting and pitching, with all of the fielding and baserunning handled by the Wii.
Each game features a standard play mode, training mode, and multiple player options. The standard play mode mimics each game's respective method of play: tennis, a doubles match; baseball, a simple three-inning game of pitching and batting; bowling, a ten-pin, ten-frame game; golf, playing on a 3-hole or 9-hole golf course; and boxing, a three-round boxing match. Training mode is a single player option that allows a player to practice certain aspects of the sports and rewards them with medals. Every game has a single-player or two-player mode, and some games allow up to four players via various methods. Bowling and golf allow for multiple players taking turns with a single Wii Remote, while tennis requires each player to have their own. The multiplayer mode for Wii Sports usually has the players competing against each other in the normal manner of the specific sports; the one exception is tennis which allows for two players to play together or against each other.
The in-game characters are taken from the Wii's Mii Channel, which allows the user to create a Mii (a customized avatar) that can be imported into games that support the feature. Wii Sports is the first Wii title to use this feature. Miis saved on the Wii will appear in the crowd during bowling games and as members of human-controlled teams in baseball. The non-player characters in the game were also created using the Mii Channel toolset. Miis created on one Wii can be transferred onto the internal memory of a Wii Remote for use on another Wii with different save data.
After a game, a player is awarded or penalized skill points based on performance relative to the computer's skill level, though some games do not calculate points during multiplayer sessions. The game keeps track of these points by charting them on a graph, as well as increasing the size of the crowd in Tennis and Boxing single-player modes. After obtaining 1000 skill points in a sport, a player is awarded "pro" level, along with a cosmetic feature for their Mii in Bowling and Boxing. A Mii newly turned pro will receive a message on the Wii Message Board notifying them. Wii Sports also features a fitness test that calculates a player's fitness age (ranging from 0 to 100 years old, 0 being the best possible). The test gauges the player's performance in 2 randomly chosen challenges in each test from the training mode that have been played at least once, and can only be taken three times a day per Mii (total of 6 randomly chosen challenges). Calculating the fitness age takes into account a player's balance, speed, and stamina. Fitness age results are graphed over one, two, or three months, with daily results posted on the Wii Message Board.
Read more about this topic: Wii Sports