Dave’s Personal Blog

We’ve had our Wii for a few days now, so I thought I’d add my voice the the growing number of opinions floating about the blogosphere.

The Wii is a beautiful piece of hardware in the same way that iMacs, PowerBooks, and iPods are. Sleek & white, elegant & minimalist. very nice. The controller and nunchuk fit the hand well, and the controller has a pleasant heft to it. The wrist strap is sturdy and well thought out… much to the relief of our big screen tv.

The user experience is good, and very smooth. Again, somewhat reminiscent of Apple’s OS X. The Wii remote speaker & rumble are used very effectively for interface feedback.

The bundled Wii Sports is a blast. The golf game is the first computer golf game that I’ve ever enjoyed (I’m not a golfer btw), although the swing does seem a bit twitchy at times. So far, I’m attributing that to unfamiliarity with the controller. Baseball and Bowling are other favourites. The boys enjoy boxing.

I’ve only had a bit of time to spend playing our other games. Rayman Raving Rabbids is hilarious. We weren’t sure about it, but Thomas was adamant that we get it. He was right.. it’s great fun.

I haven’t played any of the previous Zelda installments but The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess feels pretty good. I’m looking forward to exploring Hyrule. The changing camera angle is a bit off-putting, but I’m sure I’ll get used to it.

I picked up Need for Speed: Carbon as well. I love racing games, and this ones seems solid. Again, it’ll take a while to get used to the controls… but I usually find that with a new racing game.

We preordered Red Steel as well. I wasn’t as impressed with that. The Wii’s graphics aren’t up to the standards set by the Playstation and Xbox, and are, IMO, not up to “realistic” rendering. That doesn’t cause me any grief, as I favour Miyamoto style gaming. Also, the “shoot everything and everyone you see” style of game leaves me shaking my head and muttering about the state of society. I think that one will be going back to EB Games to be traded in for a copy of Tony Hawk’s Downhill Jam.

Overall, the Wii is a keeper. Nancy, who is a self labelled “not a gammer” loves it. I’ve been a casual gammer lately (since Quake and it’s ilk outran my ability to keep up with the hardware requirements), but with my new DS Lite and now the Wii, that’s quickly changing.

Now I’m anxiously waiting for the contingent of Mario games to be released… and hoping to see a rendition of MarioKart for Wii… although MarioKart DS keeps me happy (especially with online play).

In our house we go to Sony for the TV & sound system, but it’s Nintendo for games. And Microsoft… we have no use for them at all.