Fair's Fair - Thoughts on Wii Wednesday, December 06 2006
Been meaning to write up some thoughts for a while, but just haven't had a chance. Pretty busy today, but just wanted to toss out a mini-review-like-thingy (to use the technical term). Short form, I really like the Wii, but with some caveats.
The controller works well - but for some genres. As I've said before, first person shooters and "point to aim" just isn't this console's strength. It works, but there's a lag. Best way to describe it is that you simply cannot snap to a point as you might with a laser pointer. The lag causes you to have to slow down and compensate, and you tend to overshoot. However, for less time-critical purposes, using the remote to aim works just fine, and that's actually part of the magic of the Wii dashboard.
One feature I found super-compelling was the ability to create a mini-avatar, or "Mii." This is genius. I personally had way too much fun creating my little guy. But what was really impressive is just how compelling this was for non-core game users. My friends and roommate see me play pretty much every game on every system and are generally unimpressed. (Zuma was the last great wave that overtook them – but hey, it sold +2 360s last holiday!) The Mii creation got them all playing with the system for hours – and this was just creating little computer avatars for themselves. The roommate went and did a funky 70’s bar character, friends did representations of themselves, an ex-girlfriend spent two hours fussing over hair style, color, and lips. And people were attached to these little guys – when you started messing with someone else’s Mii while they were away (dark hair to blond, tall to short and squat), they noticed immediately and retaliated – good fun. 
This is all in the dashboard, mind you - we hadn't even gotten to the games. The interesting thing I found was that this Mii creation process ended up being a bridge to actually playing the games. A few folks didn’t have that much interest in trying another “video game” like tennis… but once they saw they could use their character, or be in the audience, they suddenly jumped in and played. And loved it. Very, very cool - Nintendo has taken a huge step forward here in personalization. The primary problem with Mii's is that they'll be difficult to take and use in other non-Nintendo games - but it does open up some thoughts on what sort of personalization metadata might be applicable and usable across an entire platform (including other publisher's games).
The online service isn't there yet - but to be fair, it also wasn't promised at launch as did Sony. Nintendo is still insisting on using Friend Codes (or Wii number) to identify yourself on the system. This sort of sucks. While they took some good leaps ahead of all of the competition in personalization with the Mii concept, this is a definite throwback. It's also difficult as hell to use. In spite of knowing a friend's Wii number, we were never able to get the boxes to have any sort of friend relationship. I have a greyed out entry in my address book for my friend, as does he for I. In spite of much experimentation, we're not quite sure how to fully enable that link. We also both tried adding our email addresses to the book, and in fact each received email at our accounts instructing us to respond to approve communication. However, in spite of doing so I still am not able to communicate across the PC/Wii. <shrug> I assume this will be fixed, either though an update or clueless user education. There are other holes in the current online experience. Weather and News channels aren’t there yet, and the Opera web browser is also unavailable. All are promised to be “coming soon,” but right now it’s pretty frustrating to not be able to use those parts of their dash.
Graphically the Wii won't blow your socks off. Even Zelda, probably one of the best looking Wii games, only ranges from "ok" to "very good" in my opinion. (Yes, I have the component cables.) My hope is that there will be enough games that don't need high-end graphics to enable the Wii to survive past the first couple of years. If there are enough innovative first-party games like Mario Galaxy or Warioware, it could happen. And frankly, looking ahead at Nintendo's likely arcade thinking, they could be well positioned to be the $100 downloadable arcade/party game platform in the years ahead. At that price, who wouldn't pick one up?
Of the released games, Zelda is pretty much the one to have (with Wii Sports being an obvious one to pick up, except it's already bundled with the box). Zelda does start slow - fair warning. You have to spend literally two hours before it actually kicks in while they run you through what feels like a too long controller training level. I'll also add that the new controls don't add anything to the Zelda experience - frankly, they were tacked on to help sell Wiis. However, they also don't negatively impact the game experience so it's a bit of a wash.
I probably could write more but have to hit some other stuff. I'll leave you with this article from Tom Bramwell of Gamesindustry.biz (who also wrote one of the PS3 articles yesterday). Some good thoughts on Wii there, and I'll be curious on your comments.
Let's Mii up. Give me your #, and I'll add it (if you like), here's mine...
4481-5325-3522-3301
davefoxis AT gmail DOT com