A decade after its release, the Nintendo classic shows one way it’s way better than real tennis.

Few video games have achieved such phenomenal, mainstream popularity as Nintendo’s Wii Sports, particularly the game’s recreation of tennis. Honestly, though, the whole thing left me sort of cold. It took a sport that I’ve always personally found a little lacking in excitement, then combined it with motion controls that remove the ability to control your position on the court.

So after I tried the game a few times back in 2006, I thought, “Eh, that was sort of fun,” then went back to playing Valkyrie Profile 2 and Ape Escape 3. I may have sold Wii Sports tennis short, though. It’s got enough lasting entertainment value that even a decade after its release, people are still firing up their Wiis for a match, and as this crazy clip shared by Japanese Twitter user @fp_ll proves, Wii tennis has the potential for some amazing action that rivals any found in the dragon-slaying, primate-capturing games I passed it by for.

https://twitter.com/fp_ll/status/780405386276777984

As savvy gamers know, while the appeal of motion controls is that they allow you to interact with the game by performing the movements you would in reality, often you don’t have to go through the entire real-world range of motion for the hardware to register an action. Because of that, you can swing the Wii’s controller in a more compact arc than you’d need when hitting a real tennis ball with a racket, which means your onscreen character can whack away at the ball with blinding speed. And if you can do that, so can your opponent, which makes inhumanly fast rallies like the one seen in @fp_ll’s video possible.

It’s so fast that the graphics themselves have trouble keeping up, as if you pause the video in certain spots you’ll see a character’s racket has glitched so that he’s holding two at once. The capabilities of the two Wii athletes playing the net are so far beyond those of actual humans that online commenters have had to turn to the world of anime to find suitable approximations.

And if you think the frenetic digital visuals of Wii tennis call for some frenetic digital music, here’s a portion of the match set to dubstep.

Now I just wish I’d known about the full potential of this game 10 years ago.

Source: Otakomu
Featured image: Twitter/@fp_ll

Follow Casey on Twitter, where he’d like to clarify that nothing said here should be construed as his saying something so laughably untrue as “Playing Valkyrie Profile 2 was a bad idea.”