{"id":129136,"date":"2022-10-22T13:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-10-22T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.nintendolife.com\/#article-139439"},"modified":"2022-10-22T13:00:00","modified_gmt":"2022-10-22T13:00:00","slug":"soapbox-ea-playground-is-a-forgotten-gem-and-deserves-to-be-remembered-with-wii-sports","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2022\/10\/22\/soapbox-ea-playground-is-a-forgotten-gem-and-deserves-to-be-remembered-with-wii-sports\/","title":{"rendered":"Soapbox: EA Playground Is A Forgotten Gem And Deserves To Be Remembered With Wii Sports"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Image: Nintendo Life<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Soapbox features enable our individual writers and contributors to voice their opinions on hot topics and random stuff they’ve been chewing over. Today, on its 15-year anniversary, Jim pleads the case for a forgotten Wii classic…<\/em><\/p>\n

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If there\u2019s one thing that you could always rely on the Wii to achieve, it was family-friendly multiplayer. Gone were the days of explaining to an elderly relative what various triggers and button combinations did, instead it was a case of swapping out your grandma\u2019s sherry with a plastic white rectangle, standing her in front of the screen watching her beat seven shades of hoo-ha out of an animated opponent in the boxing ring.<\/p>\n

The console\u2019s simplicity was its biggest selling point, and boy-oh-boy did it have the games to match. For the most part, first-party titles like Wii Sports<\/a>, Wii Play<\/a>, Wii Music<\/a><\/del>, and WarioWare Smooth Moves<\/a>, are always going to dominate these conversations, and rightly so \u2013 they were, and still are, incredible fun. This is by no means going to be a piece saying, “hmm,<\/em> actually, Wii Sports wasn\u2019t all that,<\/em>” because that would be a straight-up lie \u2014 don’t ever be that person. There is, however, one title that is almost never included in discussions of family-friendly Wii titles, especially in the sports genre: EA Playground<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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it was all about good-natured fun with your dead-eyed, ever-staring avatar pals<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Let\u2019s start right off the bat by saying that I do not believe that Playground was necessarily better<\/em> than Wii Sports. The playable avatars had cold dead eyes, the motion controls were a little janky, and the single-player mode was all about collecting stickers or marbles or whatever else a board of 40-something-year-old men thought was a hip currency with the kids at the time.<\/p>\n

But what I do believe is that this title has been well and truly slept on for the past 15 years, and it is about time that somebody put that right.<\/p>\n

The Wii had enough games in the sports genre to fill its memory banks three times over. Aside from the ports of NBA Live<\/a>, Fifa<\/a>, Virtua Tennis<\/a>, and Tiger Woods\u2019 PGA Tour<\/a> (which always felt very much out of place on the console), the sports collections \u2014 your Wii Sports Resort<\/a>s, Mario Sports Mix<\/a>es \u2014 were where the motion controls could really shine. These were titles where the whole idea was to throw a bunch of sports together, safe in the knowledge that, while some would be better than others, that was ok because you could always move on to something different.<\/p>\n