Playing 34 Sport Games: World Edition is like going back in time to the early days of Wii shovelware. If you are unfamiliar with the term, it refers to when minigame collections of questionable quality, usually because of fuzzy and inconsistent controls, would flood the Wii game catalogue. 34 Sport Games: World Edition manages to emulate this feeling despite providing a plethora of minigames and having some good ideas. Good ideas come to nothing when the controls are so wholly that you can’t really be sure whether anything you do will actually work.
The 34 games vary from Olympic-style track and field events to arcade adaptations of other sports like football, tennis, and volleyball. There are two strengths I will praise this game for. The first is its stretching of the imagination for each sport. Basketball is a hoop shooting game where the hoops move around the screen. Skateboarding is an endless runner-style game to avoid traffic. Swimming takes place in a river and is turned into a rhythm game. That leads me to strength number two. Almost every game has its own unique control scheme. Even when track and field events have similar run, jump, or throw goals, the controls or the user interface are switched up to offer a slightly different challenge. It makes a difference and reminds me heavily of some excellent PS2 Summer Games titles that focused on using analogue sticks in different motions for different events.
All of this thought is severely undermined by a combination of loose and fuzzy timing and physics, which, when combined with a depth-of-field perspective issue, make playing many of these minigames incredibly annoying. I’ll take this game’s version of wall squash as a prime example. Four players are trapped in a small portion of the screen to take turns hitting the ball for the next opponent. Visually, you can miss the ball with your racket, and it’ll still count as a hit, as the game is trying to be forgiving… or is it? It is tricky to spot the ball as it bounces up and down because everything feels too round. Sometimes the ball visually moves through the racket, but in reality, I think it actually went under the racket due to a bounce. You just can’t tell. This issue impacts all ball games and anything from a viewed-from-above perspective. Input delay lag also impacts precision, but oddly, you get used to pressing buttons early. The UI helps you work out when to press the button, even if it goes against what the UI suggests. This all adds up to a frustrating, inconsistent experience.
If you are looking for a decent 4-player local multiplayer minigame collection based on sports, Tokyo 2020 does arcade sports collections far better than this, as do any of the Sonic and Mario games. If you are after minigames in general, Lego Party is a stunningly enjoyable local multiplayer party game. Whilst 34 Sport Games: World Edition has now had a discount, because a new 40 Sport Games edition has come out since (with I expect similar quality issues), I’d urge you to invest in the hundreds of indies, or an extra £15 for the truly great Lego Party instead.
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