Review by: Andrew Groen

Sports Champions has received surprisingly little ill will for being one of the biggest rip offs of the year. It truly is. It's a near perfect mimicry of Nintendo's strategy in using Wii Sports to exhibit the motion control capabilities of the Wii Remote when it released in 2006.

That's not just because it's a sports compilation, but the assortment of sports is very similar as well. There's a rolling game, racquet game, combat game, and golf game (Frisbee golf). Sports Champions' Volleyball is really the only unique addition it brings to the mix (it doesn't help that it's also easily the worst of the bunch.)

The sentiment is the same as well. The idea is to bring extremely familiar experiences to the audience so that this intimidating new control system isn't compounded by an intimidating rule set. The familiar games ground the players enough to keep them playing while they get used to the controls.

But rip-off or not, Sports Champions delivers on the execution and that's what really matters. Plus, for what it's worth, this Wii Sports clone is quite a bit better than Wii Sports itself. That's thanks mostly to the Move hardware which has capabilities and precision far beyond that of the Wii Remote circa 2006. Many of the games in Wii Sports would simply log when a motion was made, and then instruct the computer to display a canned animation. The PlayStation Move one-ups that with true 1:1 motion that creates unique swings and actions based on the force and angle you move the controller.

Not to say that the developer didn't do a good job on the software side, but I think that the Move hardware is the real star of the show here. All of the games are fairly simplistic, relying on one very simple mechanic that is flexible enough to allow for skill and strategy. The Ping Pong game for instance would be quite boring if it was just a matter of hitting the ball back and forth. But more difficult opponents introduce ball spin. Which essentially changes the entire game since you need to account for the direction of spin the opponent applied to the ball and counter it.

Frisbee Golf is similar. At first you just have to throw the disc in the right direction. While harder levels require you to curve the disc just right.