wii love it
Oh man, is it possible that I’m the first ldopan to play with the Wii?
(Ed. — it looks that way. Dammit! ~jeff)
Heh.
It is awesome.
It’s really easy to learn to play and fun right away. The Wiimotes (or Wiinises, as my host preferred to call them) are comfortable to use, and seems like they would be comfortable for most-sized hands to feverishly grip for 10+ hours. The speaker in each Wiinis is utilized well. Because the speaker is in each controller, you get individualized feedback for when it’s your turn and if you’ve achieved the proper motion for the game you’re playing. The sound from the Wiinis also integrates well with the more-backgroundy sound from the TV, making your sound experience subtle and useful at the same time.
To start, you create a Mii (I know, painfully cute) with enough control over the look and size of the cartoonish features that you can make a really specific and personal guy. Apparently these Miis can mingle over some kind of internets people keep telling me about.
It comes with Tennis, Baseball, Golf, Bowling, and Boxing, with three additional training supplements for each. I didn’t try any Boxing or the non-training Golf game since apparently they’re more complicated and difficult, but I was able to recreate my suckage in sports with incredible accuracy with the others. Yet it was still incredibly fun. It was so intuitive and came out with results that seemed pretty reasonably realistic (while remaining cute and cartoonish) to the point where I was actually wondering to myself if I could use it to train and avoid the embarrassing mistakes I make in baseball in private, enough to join a real team. Then I remembered being good at these sports entails actual muscles when you’re not playing on the Wii.
The action is smooth and the controller is responsive. The buttons are pretty simple, though a first-time user might not realize that while A is the big button on top, B is a trigger underneath. There are helpful (i.e., soon-to-become-annoying) diagrams it shows you on screen when you’ve mixed something up. The Wiinises have both infrared and internal proprioception, so it is generally faithful to your motion with few errors.
The paper lamp in my friend’s living room has sadly suffered some of the collateral damage we’ve all been hearing about, so enjoy the totally new gaming experience (TM) with care.
