Mini Sports Collection

Genre: Compilation / Sports (Various)

Players: 1

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Review:

Mini Sports Collection, released on Nintendo 3DS in 2017, is a Compilation of 12 Sports minigames loosely themed after Summer Olympics competitions, with each of these sports boiled down to only its most basic elements.

The presentation here is decent but eclectic, featuring a variety of 2D art styles. One of the minigames might star pixel art cats, while the next one looks like an old monochrome LCD handheld game. It almost feels like this game might be trying to go for a WarioWare sorta’ vibe, which would make sense given the simplistic nature of the games. These varying art styles are backed by a synthesized generic “sports” soundtrack – nothing memorable or extraordinary, but it fits the theme of the game well enough.

When it comes to the gameplay, each of the included minigames here is about as simple as you can get. 100-Meter Sprint is a button-mashing game, Pro Wrestling is a single-button quick-draw, Skeet Shooting is a fast-paced “Simon Says” game, and so on. About the most complicated this gets is Tennis, which actually has you moving a character around a court and tapping a button to hit the ball. However, this is the exception rather than the norm.

Simple needn’t necessarily be bad. After all, I’ve already name-checked one series that thrives on simplicity, the WarioWare games. However, WarioWare makes it work by adding in variety with a multitude of games, all thrown at the player in rapid-fire fashion. Mini Sports Collection doesn’t do that, it tries to make each game its own separate event, and there’s just not enough to each game to justify that, nor are there enough of them to keep players interested by switching from one to the next.

Making matters even worse is that some of these games have some significant problems. The control and hit detection in Tennis is abysmal, Speed Skating has the view too close, making it hard to anticipate turns, Rugby has the player dodging left and right but makes movement far too slow.

The result is that Mini Sports Collection is a game that has elements that could be combined into a fun “WarioWare but for sports”, but that doesn’t join them into a cohesive whole, and separately they’re all far too simple and at times outright broken to hold players’ interest.

tl;dr – Mini Sports Collection is a Compilation of 12 extremely simple Sports minigames patterned loosely after Summer Olympics games. While there’s some potential here to build towards something resembling a Sports-themed WarioWare, there’s not enough variety or cohesion for that, and many of the games are simply too flawed. What results is a game that’s just too shallow to keep your interest for more than a few minutes before you move on.

Grade: D

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