Arcade Sports Review

You’ve seen this kind of game millions of times before on Wii — a tossed-together collection of various sporting activities reimagined to work with the motion controls of the Wii Remote, but the controls are rough, the graphics are worse and the presentation is just painful to try to trudge through. Yep, this is just one more. Arcade Sports is instantly forgettable.

The four games this particular WiiWare download offers have a loose pool hall/bowling alley theme tying them together. There are three tabletop arcade favorites — billiards, air hockey and the more rarely-seen snooker — along with standard bowling. Each one employs some simple combination of button presses and Wiimote motions to simulate their actions of tossing a ball, hitting a puck or lining up a cue stick, and it’s all kind of OK. But it’s really pretty boring.

There just isn’t any spark here — no real creativity or unique element that’s going to grab your interest and hold it. The same repetitive background track loops sad music through each of the four games, the visuals are barebones with no added flair . . . you’ll be suppressing a yawn after the first three minutes.

The worst offense in Arcade Sports, though, is its lack of instruction — there are no explanations, no tutorials. It’s like the tables are just there, sitting abandoned in the pool hall, and you walked in to find no one else around and decided to just screw around hitting balls. You might not personally need instruction for some of these games, but many people would — especially for a game like snooker. How many people know how to play snooker, right off the top of their heads? Not me. I just bashed the balls around at random until I finally left the game to check its Operations Guide, which offered about two sentences of basic rules assistance.

Closing Comments
So Arcade Sports is a disappointment. You’ve seen this kind of game a million times before, and you won’t remember it ever existed a year from now. Skip it quickly.