Wii-cked Gaming
A couple of weeks ago in New York City I was lucky enough to score two Nintendo Wii consoles with merely a 2 hour wait in line at the Times Square Toys R Us. I received a ticket to purchase a console when I joined the line, and I roped in my nine year old son to get a ticket too. See pictures below of us in line, along with some new friends, with our tickets; Wii boxes stacked up at the Toys R Us; and my son Bas and I with one of our Wiis.
One of the Wii consoles has been sent on home to Bonaire via slow boat, but we managed to install the other one last week at the in-laws while visiting for Christmas, and it was great fun. We now have the same Wii set up in our living room on our big screen and it’s still fun.
Nintendo has, in my estimation, never been stupid - foolish and foolhardy yes, but not stupid. And the Wii is no exception. While the Wii has been derided by game mavens as having mediocre graphics, the fact is that the Wii is designed to be used with just about all existing televisions. Okay, so it doesn’t look as crisp and awe inspiring as an Xbox 360 or PS3 running in high definition with an appropriately designed game title and all the right cables, but most real folks don’t have HD TVs yet.
So, in contrast to the Sony PS3 and Xbox 360, for which an HD TV is pretty much required, the Wii is effectively plug and play with current display technology (but get a component video cable if you want to get a bit better resolution out of it on a newer TV). And from personal experience, you don’t notice jagged pixels or fuzziness when you’re madly shaking your hands and arms to make your character on the screen run, jump, or whatever - you’re too busy playing the game using the Wii’s innovative input devices.
The three titles I have found so far that make the best use of the Wii remote (and Wii nunchuk in some cases) are the free Wii Sports game disc which comes with the Wii (features Baseball, Tennis, Bowling, and Golf), Excite Truck, and Super Monkey Ball. And the latest Zelda (Twilight Princess) is good too, but it takes quite a bit of game time to get to where you are using the wireless motion controls in a broad range of ways.
Super Monkey Ball in particular features 50 mini-games ranging from darts, running hurdles, races, space shooters, tightrope walking, and much much more. But even Super Monkey Ball probably only scratches the surface on original ways game developers will likely put the wireless controls to use in the future.
I have read and heard a fair bit of commentary from naysayers that the Wii is just a fad, and recreational gamers will soon tire of it, but I’m not so sure. There’s something very satisfying about being able to physically interact with a video game, whether it be swinging a control like a golf club in a golf game, playing tennis with the control as a racket, throwing darts, or even pointing the remote at the screen as an aiming mechanism for some weapon in a first person shooter. Certainly it’s a lot more natural to point your “gun” at a target than it is to use a joystick to rotate your view so that your cross hairs then line up on your target.
And while reports of television destruction and bodily injury from flailing arms, snapping Wii Remote restraint cords, and sweat-induced slipperiness abound, the experience in my family is that the greatest pain resulting from use of the Wii controllers is the day after vigorous play - muscle aches being the most common malady.
I am firmly convinced the Wii will outsell the PS3 and Xbox 360 by mid-2008, if for no other reason than it will work very well with pretty much any TV already in use today, as well as new ones being purchased, combined with the fact that it’s much more attractively priced than the higher end alternatives, meaning it’s more accessible to a larger number of people. It also doesn’t hurt that the game titles available for the Wii are much more family friendly than those for the PS3 (and to some extent, the Xbox 360), at least as things stand now.
I give the Nintendo Wii a 9.0 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale.
