Wii Sports - Baseball

This is a capture of me playing the Baseball mode in Wii Sports for the Wii. This was recorded directly from my Wii (not the Wii U).

It's hard to believe that it has been nearly 10 years since the Wii was released. I still remember having to hunt down a system about two weeks after launch because the Wii was sold out everywhere on its release date. But once I got the system home and tried out Wii Sports, I was instantly hooked. Tennis and bowling were amazing, and the other sports were fun too.

Almost a month later, on Christmas day of 2006, my visiting family members learned that I had obtained a Wii, and they demanded that I bring the system out into the living room so they could play Wii Sports. My mother, cousing, aunt, uncle, and even my grandmother all spent a few hours playing multiple rounds of each sport, and we had tons of fun. It was then that I realized the true genius of the Wii: you could get anyone to play it. Coming off the N64 and GameCube eras where I couldn't get anyone except my friends to play video games with me, this was a welcomed change. People had so much fun with the new system that I ended up taking the Wii to various friends' and family members' houses throughout 2007 for bouts of Wii Sports and other games.

Wii Sports itself was nothing short of a phenomenon along the lines of Tetris or Super Mario Bros., and a damn good game as well. The new Wii Remote was a ton of fun and allowed me to use gestures that actually mimicked the sports themselves. I had been a fan of different controllers, such as turbo controllers, joysticks and light guns, dating all the way back to the NES era, so the new Wii Remote really captivated me.

I had played a few baseball games as a kid, although it was mostly Baseball for the Game Boy (I actually enjoyed that game quite a bit). When I managed to play the Baseball mode in Wii Sports, I really liked the motion controls, but I was let down by the overall lack of control over pitching and fielding. For me, half the fun of Game Boy Baseball was controlling the outfielders, but that was taken away in Wii Sports. In addition, a game of Wii Sports Baseball didn't last a full nine innings, so I didn't play this mode all that often.

Sadly, no company ever produced a full-fledged motion-controlled baseball game for the Wii, at least to my knowledge, so I never purchased a standalone baseball game for the system. However, Wii Sports Baseball can be fun once in a while.

In this video I played a baseball game against the AI at the Pro level.

Recorded with the Hauppauge HD PVR and the Wii's component cables at 60 frames per second.

I'm using a Wii Remote.