''Big Beach Sports'' is a

sports game A sports video game is a video game that simulates the practice of sports. Most sports have been recreated with a game, including team sports, track and field, extreme sports, and combat sports. Some games emphasize actually playing the sport (s ...

for the

Wii The Wii ( ) is a home video game console developed and marketed by Nintendo. It was released on November 19, 2006, in North America and in December 2006 for most other Regional lockout, regions of the world. It is Nintendo's fifth major ho ...

developed by

HB Studios HB Studios Multimedia Limited is a Canadian video game developer based in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. It is best known for its Rugby football, rugby and cricket games. History HB Studios was founded in early July 2000 by Jeremy Wellard in Lunenburg ...

and produced by

THQ THQ Inc. was an American video game company based in Agoura Hills, California. It was founded in April 1990 by Jack Friedman, originally in Calabasas, and became a public company the following year through a reverse merger takeover. Initi ...

. The game is a collection of six

beach sports Beach sports are a classification of sport activities which are conducted on a sand surface. They are traditionally associated with being played on a natural, coastal sand beach, but also often take place on artificially constructed in-land playing ...

simulations, in which players compete on a beach resort location. The sports include:

American football American football (referred to simply as football in the United States and Canada), also known as gridiron, is a team sport played by two teams of eleven players on a rectangular field with goalposts at each end. The offense, the team with ...

volleyball Volleyball is a team sport in which two teams of six players are separated by a net. Each team tries to score points by grounding a ball on the other team's court under organized rules. It has been a part of the official program of the Summ ...

soccer Association football, more commonly known as football or soccer, is a team sport played between two teams of 11 players who primarily use their feet to propel the ball around a rectangular field called a pitch. The objective of the game is ...

bocce (, or , ), sometimes anglicized as bocce ball, bocci or boccie, is a ball sport belonging to the boules family. Developed into its present form in Italy, it is closely related to British bowls and French , with a common ancestry from ancien ...

cricket Cricket is a bat-and-ball game played between two teams of eleven players on a field at the centre of which is a pitch with a wicket at each end, each comprising two bails balanced on three stumps. The batting side scores runs by striki ...

and

disc golf Disc golf, also known as frisbee golf, is a flying disc sport in which players throw a disc at a target; it is played using rules similar to golf. Most disc golf discs are made out of polypropylene plastic, otherwise known as polypropene, which ...

. The games are not highly realistic simulations of the sports, but more orientated towards unrealistic physics, stylized beach scenarios, and a simplified rule set. It is most notable for being the third Wii game (the first being ''

Pokémon Battle Revolution is the first Wii incarnation of the '' Pokémon'' video game franchise. It is also the first Wii game to use the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection in North America and Japan and the second Wii game to wirelessly interact with the Nintendo DS handheld ...

'' and the second being '' Geometry Wars: Galaxies'') to feature connectivity to the

Nintendo DS The is a handheld game console produced by Nintendo, released globally across 2004 and 2005. The DS, an initialism for "Developers' System" or "Dual Screen", introduced distinctive new features to handheld games: two LCD screens working in tan ...

. Big Beach Sports also features the first

game on the Wii. It was released on 24 June 2008.

DS to Wii Connectivity

The DS application downloads a small application from the Wii, which allows the player to draw the created character's face (eyes, ears, nose, mouth and eyebrows) and upload it back from the

to the Wii. The character will then appear that way in the game. This application does not require any DS game to be inserted into the Nintendo DS.

Gameplay

All of the games allow up to 4 players playing at the same time, or in the case of Bocce and Disc Golf, taking alternate turns. All the games use the Wii Remote only, no games require the use of the Nunchuck or any other peripheral. After creating a character, the player can compete in tournaments against increasingly tougher opponents in any of the sports. Playing Quick Play games and Tournament games earns the character Skill Points. These are then used to calculate the difficulty of the CPU opponent for future Quick Play matches. Hence, after completing all tournaments for all the sports in Big Beach Sports, where each game has a preset difficulty, the player can then return to Quick Play and continue to max out Skill Points (999 points) for each of the six sports. In the case of most of the sports, however, the game becomes extremely challenging and the AI opponents are much tougher to beat after reaching 900 skill points.

Reception

''Big Beach Sports'' received a fairly poor reception from critics, with an average

Metacritic Metacritic is a website that review aggregator, aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted arithmetic mean, weighted average). M ...

score of just 44%. ''IGN'' was scathing, deriding the game as a "true cash-in project that ignores some of the great control fundamentals laid down with Nintendo's game for an unintelligent waggle-and-win design". THQ CEO Brian Farrell referred to the game as "an unmitigated success" in the company's Q1 2009 earnings call and referred to it in his strategic plan at the end of 2008. It received a "Platinum" sales award from the

Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association The Association for UK Interactive Entertainment (Ukie) is a non-profit trade association for the video game industry in the United Kingdom (UK). Ukie was originally founded as the European Leisure Software Publishers Association (ELSPA), and the ...

(ELSPA), indicating sales of at least 300,000 copies in the United Kingdom.

Sequel

A sequel, ''Big Beach Sports 2'', was released for the Wii in 2010.

References

External links

* * {{moby game, id=/big-beach-sports 2008 video games American football video games Association football video games Beach volleyball video games Cricket video games Embracer Group franchises Games with Wii-DS connectivity HB Studios games Multiplayer and single-player video games Multiple-sport video games THQ games Video games developed in Canada Wii-only games Wii games