Way back in the N64 days, Nintendo mildly shocked the gaming industry with its inclusion of Nintendo Sports: which was a grouping of sports games that would be made and published by Nintendo, and exclusive only to their systems. Needless to say, Nintendo Sports was a big hit that rarely gets discussed, as the likes of Waverace 64, NBA Courtside, 1080 Snowboarding, WWF No Mercy, Wayne Gretzky’s 3-D Hockey, Mario Golf, and Mario Tennis became phenomenal hits. To add to that, you had underrated gems like Excitebike 64, Ken Griffey Jr. Slugfest, All-Star Baseball 2000 grace the system. But for whatever reason starting from the later days of the Gamecube on, Nintendo’s efforts towards sports games greatly diminished.
While EA owned the NFL license, Nintendo still had access to the extreme sports games, baseball, basketball, and more. The Seattle Mariners never made their next-gen baseball game, Kobe only did one more Courtside (which was weak), and the only true sports success story were the Mario sports games—especially Super Mario Strikers. As for the Wii, their potential with sports games was met with ho-hum attempts after monster smash Wii Sports. In the meantime, you saw a rise in baseball and basketball video games while Madden continues to make good money for EA Games. Sports games made excellent money for all three systems in the seventh generation, whether it’s the arcade sports games on the Wii, or the simulators on the competitors. Nintendo however can pull all the stops if they put forth the effort in showing its potential in the upcoming system. Which leads us to the WiiU: If the WiiU wants to truly succeed, they need to become the frontrunner and new frontier for sports games.
The WiiU would be absolutely perfect for most sports games, especially football.
And it has everything to do with the controller/tablet.
Let’s start with football, which would benefit the most from the tablet. Imagine being able to choose plays without having to look at a menu on the screen. You can just look at your controller and scan and pick. Even better the tablet can keep track of your statistic throughout the games, allowing you to alter your strategy depending on the results. Even cooler would be the ability to create your own plays by turning your controller into a whiteboard full of Xs and Os. Imagine being able to create dozens of random plays for your team and then taking it online to take on other opponents and their created plays. While the ability to make plays is nothing new, with the tablet technology it can be driven to a whole new level. Football is a very strategic sport so a tablet controller makes a perfect complement to the game.
Another sport heavy on the strategy would be baseball, which can also benefit well from this tablet. Imagine being able to quickly alter your lineups and shift your infield/outfield without having to press a variety of buttons or refer to a menu screen on the television. Imagine the ability to scan through dozens of statistics of the opposing players like a manager before drawing conclusions as to who is going out there on the field. The tablet for the WiiU will most likely be used for mostly gimmicks, but posing as an information center would be loads of fun and would definitely add depth to the sports simulators.
Then there’s basketball, which can also benefit from the tablet by doubling it as a playmaking whiteboard. Wouldn’t it be awesome to draw out what might be the game-winning play in the playoffs for your team? After years of screaming at the television when a coach makes a dumb move, this tablet allows you to see how you’d manage as a coach of a ballsquad. The only catch to all this is that outside of EA Games, Nintendo would have to whether convince the third-parties to step up in their gameplay to better suit the WiiU, or Nintendo would have to make these games themselves. Left Field Productions, the company that gave the N64 many great sports games, is no longer with them. Which would lead to Camelot and Next Level Games as the lone second-party companies that has sports experience---although both never worked on a true sim.
Bottom Line: Nintendo has a great opportunity to send the sports games to a new level with its tablet. The main issue is, will the other companies be on board with its potential and do something about it? The Wii had some excellent first/second-party games, arguably among the best in recent years. But their third party status is in shambles and has been for quite some time. Yet with a little effort, the likes of Sega, EA, and Next Level Games can produce some fantastic and innovative sports games that uses the tablet to its utmost potential. The entire gaming genre of sports can flip upside down if done correctly.
Until then, we gamers are just dreaming.
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