So unless you were living under a rock (or just not in the US) you know that this weekend saw the release of not one but two new consoles, the PS3 and the Wii. Sony lost my business a while ago (actually around the time of their E3 keynote earlier in the year) so I didn’t even think about trying to get hold of one of the 17* PS3 units shipped on Friday, but the Nintendo unit sparked my interest enough to see me spend Sunday morning running from line to line to find a Wii. Thanks to Toys R Us in New York’s Times Square (and extreme patience) I was able to get not one but two consoles (Wii meet eBay – eBay, Wii) and a handful of games. Read on for my thoughts…
First up, the console itself. The packaging is cool, lots of things to unwrap, and a couple of unusually verbose user guides together with a free game (how long since we last saw that?). The design of the Wii itself is nice, it’s small and quiet and the slot-loading disc tray is super cool. The inclusion of just composite A/V cables is a shame, particularly as they’ve totally sold out of the only other choice – component. This is preventing a lot of people from getting the setup they really want with their TV. But apart from that I can’t fault the package, you get one each of the Wiimote controller and the nunchuck, as well as the sensor bar which sits on the TV.
In use, the console’s menu system is easy enough to find your way around, but coming from the 360 it’s awfully lacking in features. There’s the setup menu, a thing for looking at photos from an SD card, and the “Mii Channel” (which I’ll mention in a moment). Add in a store for buying downloadable games (not many of them yet) and some basic messaging, and that’s it. There’s a menu entry for the “Weather Channel” and “News Channel” but neither of them work yet. I’d like to see more – where’s the media player, or the downloadable demos and videos, or even real friends support. You see the Wii reuses the “friend code” system from the DS. What this means is that to register someone as a friend (and use any of the messaging features) you have to exchange your 16-digit Wii codes with each other and enter them. There’s no way of doing this via the console, you have to use email or some other communication method. This is crazy, Xbox Live makes this so simple and Nintendo seem to have gone out of their way to make life hard for us.
The Mii Channel is a application for creating Miis, which are basically little 3D avatars you design to look like yourself (or anyone else). It’s fun to do, and what’s cool is that the Miis will roam around between all the consoles on your friends network and meet up with the others there. What I don’t understand (and hasn’t yet been explained by Nintendo) is what they actually do. You can use them as in game characters for some games (currrently Wii Sports is the only one AFAIK) but they don’t hold profile or score information like an Xbox Live account, so I just don’t see any practical purpose to them. Still, they’re cute so maybe they don’t need a purpose.
Check back later for more posts on the games themselves, and that crazy control scheme!
* OK, so maybe there were a few more than that. But not many.
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