Mon 20 Nov 2006
So I picked up one of them newfangled Nintendo Wii game devices. I shall outline the adventure by which I came to acquire this item as well as my initial thoughts in the paragraphs that follow. I don’t know if any of the other Tiny Gods have purchased or used the Wii, but I’d love to hear some of your opinions.
I had been planning on buying a Wii for a fairly long time. The Dreamcast was the last gaming console that I had owned. I am not a big fan of consoles. My heart has always been in PC gaming. When I read about the Wii, I was determined to own one. Nintendo has clearly made innovative gameplay their priority and I was excited by that. Even though I wanted one so badly, I had no intention to fight through a horde of fanboys to buy one at launch. Waiting until after the holidays seemed like a peachy idea to me.
Saturday afternoon I left work and went to my friend Chris’s house to watch the second half of the OSU/Michigan game. During one of the commercial breaks Chris mentioned wanting to try to grab a Wii at one of the many midnight launch events around town. I wanted to have a chance to try it out, so I told him I’d be happy to tag along with him to keep him company. After the game we went on telephone rampage. We called every Walmart, Best Buy, Target, and Meijer within an hour of the Columbus area. Many of the stores only recieved a handful of systems, and lines were already too long for everybody to get one. Our only chance was to wait until the following morning.
I’ve always laughed at people for wanting to camp out in front of a store to get a new console. It seemed silly to me that somebody would do that when they can just wait a couple weeks and get the same product with a lot less effort. In the back of my mind, though, I wondered if I were perhaps missing out on some glorious aspect of nerdery. Chris had never camped out overnight for a purchase either, so we decided to give it a try to see how exciting it would be.
If you are reading this and feel that you can relate to my situation at this point in my tale, let me offer you two pieces of advice:
1. Do NOT camp out in a line during November unless you live somewhere on the equator.
2. If you decide to ignore #1, then do yourself a favor and pack every blanket, sweatshirt, sleeping bag, space heater, hat, book of matches, pile of old newspapers, and hot tub you own. Because it kinda sucks to sit around outside in freezing cold weather.
Chris and I selected a Target store that had received 60 consoles. They were going to hand out tickets to the first 60 people in line at 7am, and then open their doors at 8am. Without really thinking very much we headed over at 9:30pm to get our campsite all setup. When we got there, we realized that we had forgotten a couple things. We watched all the other Wiinerds setting up their lawn chairs from our less comfortable concrete sidewalk seats and realized that sidewalks were not made for ten hours of sitting. Chris ran into Target before they closed and bought two fold-up chairs and a case of Mountain Dew. We were all set. For about 20 minutes. Apparently cold weather drains precious heat and feeling from hands. Chris had to run out to another store to buy us a couple pairs of gloves. All was good for about another hour. I ended up making another run to buy myself a hat and some warmer socks. When I got back we broke out some sleeping bags and blankets. We spent most of the night watching movies on Chris’s laptop and played a little bit of Mario Kart DS against some of the other folks in the line (I took them all to school.) The cold got to a point that seemed borderline fatal, and at the point that I realized this (when we still had six hours to wait) I almost cried.
It was all worth it in the end, though. I picked up a Wii, an extra remote, and the Zelda game. I got about 40 minutes of sleep while waiting in line and another hour when we got back to Chris’s place. The rest of my Sunday was spent exclusively playing games.
The system is simply amazing. Every accessory is nice and compact and it has a fantastic interface. There is a message center that tracks all of your playtime day by day, and it also gathers some information from games. For example, the Wii Sports game has a fitness age feature, much like Brain Age on the DS. When you take the fitness test, the results are recorded in the message center so that you can review your progress.
The feel of the controls were something I had been concerned about prior to actually playing and I was pleased to have those worries gone. The remote and the nunchuck attachment work great. They feel a lot more natural than one would expect. The analog stick on the nunchuck works better for me than it has on any other console. The combination of the analog stick and and the point-and-shoot aiming style of the remote makes movement seem a lot more fluid and easier to handle for somebody like myself who is used to using a mouse in PC games.
The quality of the graphics may not be remotely what other consoles of this generation provide, but I think the games still look great. I didn’t even mind the cheesy Fisher Price Little People-ish characters in Wii Sports. The quality of the gameplay makes the lack of next generation power a non-issue. Nintendo has proven to me, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that immersion has very little to do with looks. The Wii makes me feel like a participant rather than a spectator, and I don’t expect that I will get tired of it anytime soon.
Even though I am suffering through a day of work right now with sore arms and shoulders from a solid day of bowling, tennis, baseball, and boxing, I can’t wait to get home and play some more.
There is an interesting, nay, captivating phenomenon that occurs when a member of the fairer sex wears a tight, stretchy shirt. The fabric is stressed by the tension occuring between the bosoms,  forming gentle ripples betwixt them. Visual aids have been included to demonstrate the principle as each breast, small or large though they may be, acts as the pillar of a suspension bridge of cloth. 
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