Wii purchase and review

So, I got a Wii. It’s the first time I have ever waited in line before a release. I got my brother to go with me to Best Buy. We only went a couple hours before the store opened so we weren’t really as hard core as some people, then again it was a Wii, so we clearly aren’t that hard core. Anyway, It was kinda fun, the people in line were mostly interesting and chatty.

One funny thing, the best buy employees came out about an hour before the store opened and were talking to us a little, one of them said, “wow, you guys are all nice and happy looking, not like the PS3 people, they were scary, we were scared to come out here”. I like to think that’s what being a Sony customer does to you. (ha, just saw this hilarious cartoon about that)

The Wii itself it very nicely designed, at the quality that only Apple and Nintendo seem to bother with lately. The rectangle with a corner missing motif is used throughout the hardware, from the shape of the console itself, to a very useful shape for plugs so that they can only be inserted the correct way. The interface is very clean, and there is a really nice almost haunting background music in the menus. Wifi setup was almost automatic, and buying the first sonic the hedgehog game online was super easy :)

I got my parents and sister in law (who is a fairly avid female gamer) playing WiiSports, and they all liked it. It is actually pretty fun, in a mario party type playstyle. Older gamers will probably like it more than mario party or smashbrothers etc because the games don’t need much explanation, people know how bowling works, and baseball.

The Miis are fun, but other than WiiSports I don’t really know what games will use them. They are very visually unique, and you wouldn’t want to see them in a game like zelda for example.

As for the controller, it’s very nice, much more sensitive than I would have thought. Also the gyroscopes do a lot more work than I thought they would. A lot of the WiiSports games don’t really use the sensor bar at all, but rely on the gyroscope positioning. You do get a little tired waving it around in WiiSports, but then, it is a sports party type game so that’s ok. Zelda is much less active in terms of the remote, and you don’t get tired with that at all.

Zelda is very nice, looks similar to ocarina of time, but a little better. You don’t seem to use the remote that frequently for anything other than normal control. When you do use it, it’s for a specific action, like aiming usually. I’m not really far into it yet, but it seems very fun, and there is no problem with WiiMote fatigue :)