I completed the Baseball game within Wii Sports Club a few days ago by collecting the last of the ten stamps. This game is a Wii U exclusive and you might be wondering why it wasn't called "Wii U Sports". My memory is a little unclear but I seem to recall that in addition to buying this game as a whole package for the standard price, you could buy individual sports for a cheaper price and you could buy club passes, which allowed you to essentially rent the game, playing for 48 hours (or something like that). I think that approach to buying the game led to the "Club" branding in the name. I remember getting a couple free club passes and maybe using one of them. I was watching the game for a discount and don't remember it ever getting one. I eventually paid full price for the game many years later when the online community had already dissipated. Still, the retail version now goes for around more than that.
I did not have a Wii at launch and did not play Wii Sports regularly, but with this version really seems to replace the Wii version with HD visuals, Wii motion plus, and use of the Gamepad. The in-game achievement system of stamps is also back from the Wii version and I think this really gives you some nice goals for playing this single player. I plan to get all the stamps, but each sport is a bit of an undertaking so I am doing them one at a time. I got all ten stamps for tennis in February of 2022. That only tool my 11 hours. That game also did not use the Gamepad. This year I have been playing Baseball which took about 17 hours and uses the gamepad for the pitching/fielding half of the sport.
As I mentioned there are ten stamps to get and six of them should just happen from playing: hit a home run, strike-out one batter, catch ten fly balls, make all batters bat in one inning, shut out the other team, and hit a single, double, triple, and home run in one game. There is a leveling system and you start out facing really easy opponents. The trick is to get adept at the game before your opponents get too difficult. There are two other stamps that might be tough to get: retire the other side within three pitches and strike out three batters in a row. Again these are easy with the level 1 team, but when I was facing them I was just learning to play. You could always restart by clearing your save or using another profile but I managed to figure out the pitching just in time to get these two stamps. Then there are the two remaining stamps. One is to beat the baseball champion Enrique. I found this pretty difficult and there is no help online that I could find. If I was going to lose I would restart the game and after about a dozen false starts I managed to figure out how to beat Enrique. It felt really good, just the right level of challenge. Then there is the last stamp, hit 100 home runs (Centurion Hero stamp in the picture below). I thought this would happen on the natch as I collected the others but after beating Enrique I only had about 60 home runs. At my current level I usually just get one or two home runs per game so it was going to take far too long to get the other forty. So I did cheese this last stamp and farmed the remaining home runs in two player games played against myself. There is still some skill involved there to be able to pitch and hit at the same time so I managed to enjoy the metagame in it.
I did not pick up Switch sports because I still have this game to finish but it doesn't look like baseball made the cut with that one. So for folks looking for some motion control baseball I would highly recommend this game.
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Very impressive.
