It’s no secret that Wii Sports was one of the most important games for that system. It also won’t surprise anyone to hear that several publishers copied the idea, and a few of them even made a lot of money in the process; the Deca Sports series has sold rather well. These sort of games are obvious fits for the Wii, combining its intuitive motion controls with the ease of getting four players set up on the same system, so they have a valid place in its library. If you’re wondering what happens when you take that formula and apply it to the 3DS, a system with very different strengths from the Wii, then Deca Sports Extreme provides the answer: Nothing particularly good. None of its component mini-games are terrible, but they’re nothing special and simply not suited to this system.
The developers certainly tried to make it worth your while, providing a decent number of events and modes to play them in. You have your choice of playing in ’open’ mode where you select any given game and play right away, an obvious ’random’ mode, a championship mode where you demonstrate mastery of one event, and a tournament mode that requires cycling through several team members to prevent your characters from getting fatigued. You also get around ten games to play, including Basketball, Soccer, Tennis, Ice Hockey, Snowball Fight, Sumo Wrestling, Bowling, Sport Blowgun, Snowmobile Racing, and Trampoline jumping.
Most of those games are pretty obvious, though a few do bear explanation. Most of the conventional sports are played in a simplified way, comparable to 80s sports titles in the arcades and earliest days of the NES; even the controls are similar and the only major change is the inclusion of powerful ’trick shots’ you can occasionally do by spending some of an energy meter on them. Sumo Wrestling is actually a very basic 3D fighting game where you try to either deplete the opponent’s stamina or push them out of the ring, and Snowball Fight is a third person ’shooter’ (it is admittedly not very violent, given you’re only throwing snow at people) that pits teams of two in a fight to retrieve a pole and place it in their half of the field for a certain amount of time. The controls are all easy to learn, and each event is functional; there is nothing inherently wrong with them.
