Just a brief follow-up to my Casual Gaming post. I played a Nintendo Wii last week, and I liked it.
The Wii is just a fun platform for gaming. We saw casual gamers play it. We saw people who would never sit down and play a video game play it, and they didn’t even have to sit down! From what I hear, that’s the whole idea behind the Wii, to open up the world of gaming to people who wouldn’t normally enter into that world.
I didn’t get a ton of Wii-time, but got to try out Wii Sports, including bowling and tennis, both of which were a lot of fun.
By the time we were done, the kids were hinting about a Wii for Xmas, which ain’t gonna happen this year (recent automobile repairs made sure of that) but we’ll keep an eye on the platform and when the GameCube needs replacing, we’ll see what happens.
2 replies on “Gaming the Wii”
I already told Boone that I want a Wii for Valentine’s Day. We don’t do V-Day, but it is the next most recent pseudo-holiday for gift giving. So we are going to buy a Wii and a bunch of games.
Plus, it is so aesthetically pleasing. I think it will add to the zen in my feng shui-less apartment.
I picked up a Wii on monday, a friend of mine waited Saturday night/ Sunday morning for me while I was grandma sitting at home. Now that I have had it for a few days here are my comments.
The console is a clean console with a great set of launch offerings, however the console has yet to find a game like texas-hold-em is for the x360 platform. The Wii although fun, is currently contained to the living room. Experiences like the Xbox Vision, Live, and rechargeable remotes are nice on the 360 and offer a polished feel. However, the Wii offers a much better feel on launch day than the Xbox360.
Because of the graphics of the Wii, it makes it hard to want to buy any sort of standard control type game for the platform. The Wii-mote is the life of the system and console sales will be based on game developers continual creativity to make use of the controller in different ways. How many golf, tennis, bowling and surgery games can you make before they all feel the same? Right now the Wii is novel, but I can see how the game play might get repetitive if there is not more depth to the games control system, which might raise the entry point for beginners to the console. For now Wii sports is challenging enough to be fun and simple enough to pick up intuitively, but I get the sense that it will not be too much longer before my roommate and I are bowling near perfect games of bowling, tennis, baseball. Boxing seems to be the hardest to master.
Ideas
It would be interesting to be the web-slinger once again, and get the chance to use each arm to aim and fire a silk string like web to swing from building to building. To date, no Spiderman game has given you that experiance in such physical detail that you can chose where the web will fire, the best yet was on the xbox where you swung from left to right and your speed was based on timing, the Wii-mote has the opportunity to simulate a HD control experience, even if the graphics will feel like they are lacking just a bit.
I could also see swimming to be an interesting exercise.
For now I am going to enjoy my novel experiance, but wonder how long it will be before Microsoft finds a way to offer both HD-Controls and HD-Graphics.