A wii-kend with the Wii...
As you probably know if you've read my wife's blog, we got a Wii this weekend.I pre-ordered ages ago with utter faith that Nintendo would deliver something special. I've been close to a Wii a bunch of time but never played one (because I refused to queue for 5 hours at E3 to play for 5 minutes).
It didn't disappoint.
I unboxed the Wii in the office on Friday morning. The office party was perfectly timed to be the night before which meant that Friday was pretty much a down day.
Unplugged the Xbox 360 sat by the TV and behold a crowd.
Most of the new consoles that have come out over the last 10 or so years I've seen for the first time at work.
o Philips CD-i - remember seeing a VCD play for the first time. Was some Star Trek movie.
o Playstation 1 - the whole of Argonaut bunched over each other in awe at the graphics on Ridge Racer.
o Saturn - the same day, very disappointed with how Virtua Fighter looked.
o 3DO - erm...
o Jaguar - errrrrmmmm...
o N64 - Think I played this first in CEX in Harrow before the company bough one. Loved the look of Mario 64 but never really like the game.
o Dreamcast - Wooooooo haaaaaa... I really liked the Dreamcast and remember saying that I didn't think Power Stone could have looked any better.
o PS2 - disappointing and we'd had the dev kits for about a year.
o Xbox - better, but we'd also had the dev kits for a year or so.
Anyway - the reason I'm telling you this is because pretty much every console that has come out has been ripped apart be me and my fellow Game Industry people on the day of the Japanese launch. We'd look at how people had used the hardware, the controls, the quality of the rendering etc, etc, etc.
Wii is different. For the first time GAMES people didn't care about the technicals. All they wanted is to get their hands on the Wiimote and start playing.
Wii Sports Tennis is a big hit. So was bowling. In fact - Wii Sport pretty much stayed on all day. Finally I boxed it up and took it home.
My wife had been going crazy all day because she wanted the Wii and we were playing with it!! :)
Immediate reaction was again - incredibly positive. Spent all weekend pretty much playing Wii Sports again. Yanti can KICK MY ASS at Wii Boxing... we're talking KO'd in 20 seconds.
Messed around with the Mii's a little and now have Asuka/Emi/Amiko on my Wii.
The photo browser is nice and as I was demoing it with the card from my MDA Pro, it did a slideshow of our wedding pictures to some romantic music and we were both floored. I was better than our wedding video :)
The store is going to be interesting, but I already own most of the game that are for sale so I haven't tried the virtual console yet.
I like that fact that there's a lot of things missing. By that I mean no news or weather yet. There's also load of blank spaces for new 'channels' and I'm really looking forward to seeing what Nintendo are going to fill them with.
Nintendo are back. We used to love them - then we hated them (because they got complacent and were shitty to 3r5d parties) - they learned their lesson. DS was joy - Wii is a REVOLUTION!
Hands down winner of the best evolution of videogames since 3D.
Nic.
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