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Can we try something here, at the beginning of this review? Let's all take a moment to stop and imagine if Wii Sports had been terrible. Imagine if the sublime controls had been unresponsive and broken. Imagine if it hadn't used the Mii characters but instead created weird creepy looking people of its own. Imagine if it was all set on a beach and the sports we've grown to love were replaced with the closest beach flavoured variant they could find. Thank you ladies and gentlemen, you're now imaging Big Beach Sports.

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It's not that the idea of more sports based mini games is instantly rubbish, after all people are clamouring for news of any potential Wii Sports 2, but If you're going to try and compete with a game that is given away free with every console, the very least you've got to do is be as good.

We all know there are limits to both what the Wiimote can do and the number of sports that will work with this kind of casual mini game approach, but by picking sports that so closely match those in Wii Sports BBS is almost offering itself up for comparison. Wii Golf becomes Disk Golf (a Frisbee replaces the ball and the Wiimote swing moves 90 degrees at you'd expect), Bowling becomes Boules, Baseball turns into Cricket and Tennis morphs uncomfortably into the mess that is Volleyball.

On the up side BBS also has a take on football as well as its American namesake which is genuine new ground. The downside comes unfortunately when you realise these events prove to be the worst of the six on offer largely because they're also the most complex. Football, the proper English rules version, is virtually unplayable with a control scheme that relies on a confusing mess of button presses and Wiimote swings. Whatever you do seems to have little or no direct correlation to the onscreen action of your AI challenged team leaving you often just shaking the Wiimote and pressing buttons wildly in the hope something good will happen.

Things don't get any better for American Football with another control scheme that seems to never quite work in practice how it sounds like it should. It's this feeling of fighting to make the controls do what you want that sadly characterises pretty much all the sports in BBS. Only perhaps Disc Golf really does what it says on the tin with any degree of poise. Volleyball is vaguely entertaining to begin with simply because of its novel variation on the 'getting a ball over a net' theme but soon the strangely unresponsive controls and annoying AI drag it down too.

The one genuine positive over Wii Sports is the ability to setup and play tournaments which could have been a real selling point had the sports themselves been worth playing for more than a few minutes, but since they aren't there's not really much motivation to 'enjoy' this feature.

Graphically it's functional at best and while the developers were clearly aiming for a kind of cutesy yet trendy style when it came to character design, they ended up with a kind of sun-tanned Adams family feel to things including some of the freakiest eyes I've ever seen. This actually makes the character creation part of things the most entertaining bit of the game despite the slightly counter intuitive interface.

It's easy to compare games to superior competitors and often it's not really fair but in this case the similarities are so glaring it's impossible not to. I'd feel a bit more sympathy for Big Beach Sports if it had come out near the launch of the Wii as there'd have been no way anyone at THQ could have known how sublime Wii Sports would turn out to be. But coming as it does this far down the line just makes it look all the more like the cheap shoddy cash in it so obviously is. If you've lost or broken your Wii Sports disk, have a few quid you've taken a mysterious dislike to and want to buy a game you'll inevitably play once and hate then this is probably worth considering if you've run out of other options.

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