Sports-based mini-game collections might be the most specific genre you can get to on the Nintendo Wii and still find a metric ton of competing products. Wii Sports, Big League Sports, EA Playground and, of course, Deca Sports are just a few examples of the area and how crowded it can be. Now, Hudson's giving its work a sequel with Deca Sports 2, and they were showing it off at E3.

Fortunately, they've added several new ideas to the series to match with the 10 new games. Not only will all games support online multiplayer, but they're also all team-based, so you can select a team of five characters, and then you can select characters from that team to fit the game you're playing. Stats are kept very simple.  Characters are either small, medium or large, and that is the only play style difference that affects different games differently. While the style is still very Mii-like, they at least now have bits of personality, which can help to make the game more enjoyable.

The games are not super special, but the ideas presented were interesting. The ice hockey game in particular was very intuitive, fast and fun, reminding me favorably of classic NES games in the tradition. On the other hand, the kendo game will hopefully experience massive redesigns before the game's release, and I am just not sure at all what to think of the synchronized swimming mini-game.  It uses waggle nicely, and the ring-matching method of play is intuitive enough, but it just feels really odd.

The looks are pretty much a mirror of the original Deca Sports — that is, nothing especially good or bad — while the sounds also felt more familiar than not, but the kendo mode provided some nice cracks on the hits and parries, admittedly.

Deca Sports 2 still has several months until release, so hopefully it will have improved its weak spots before then. If nothing else, the ice hockey mode could make a fun party game, although it still doesn't really feature any fitness components or other differentiating elements to make itself very unique.