Living with the Wii

Of all the games consoles ever released, there have been none with as much divided opinion as the Nintendo Wii. It has delighted as many lapsed gamers as it has disappointed Nintendo fanboys. Is this really a brave new console, pushing the industry into new directions, or just a novelty concept machine trying to make up for its technical deficiencies. Fellow Nintendo fan, and friend of Retrogames, David Isherwood , felt so strongly about Nintendo’s new baby, that he decided to put fingers to keyboard.....

Th’Wii’ Months with a Revolution (based on true events !!)

It was the most exciting Christmas Day for years……….

The anticipation of Christmas morning was the highlight of my life so far (apart from Christmas 1972 when I ate a whole box of chocolate tools, that Father Christmas had kindly brought me, long before my parents woke up…..anyway, I digress…..)

Let me explain…..I’d pre-ordered my Nintendo Wii (or more correctly my son’s – hope he doesn’t read this as he still thinks Father Christmas brought it!) from a large computer games retail outlet (surely I don’t need to mention the name to give them any more publicity?) and was guaranteed that I would receive it before the ‘big day’. I wasn’t concerned. I shouldn’t have been so excited about this particular console launch as I’d witnessed many over the years but this one just, well, ’felt’ different.

A little bit of history….. I’d been into computer games since the late 70’s, long after my addiction to chocolate tools had dissipated, and I had acquired virtually all of them over the years. You could almost say I was a retro collector!! ‘Was’ being the operative word as I offloaded almost my entire 25 year collection on Ebay over a twelve month period from 2005-2006, only keeping my Nintendo GameCube, Microsoft Xbox and the two Nintendo DS Lites that my son and I use. Anyway, digressing again..

I’ve always been a bit of a Nintendo fanboy, usually importing consoles due to the historic NTSC/PAL speed/border issues of the 90’s, and it was a foregone conclusion that I would get a Nintendo Wii as soon as it came out. The dilemma was ‘do I go for an imported console’ as I had in the past (my GameCube is a US NTSC machine, although I originally bought a JAP machine but sold it later) or ‘ride the potential PAL storm of slow, late releases during the lifetime of the console’ but have the advantage of localised online activity which may or not be restricted if I bought an imported machine.

After much debate and discussion with friends and ‘like-minded’ people (that doesn’t translate to ‘games geeks’ before you draw your own conclusions) I decided, as you can tell if you read the 3 ^rd paragraph and are still awake reading this, to pre-order the PAL version. I’d even decided on the games/accessories I was going to get to – what planning, eh ?

The launch day came and I trotted off to collect my Wii without any of the problems that I subsequently heard about (and am still hearing about) in relation to lack of stock and pre-Christmas promises being broken. I managed to ‘bag’ all the games I wanted, which were Zelda, Super Monkey Ball, Red Steel, Wii Play, Rayman Raving Rabbids and an extra Nunchuk, and then headed for home.

A further dilemma ensued, should I ‘try out’ the Wii before the big day (it was for my son and he wouldn’t be pleased if on Christmas morning it didn’t work) or should I just wrap it up and wait the weeks until Father Christmas brought it? I decided on the latter, after much ‘soul searching’

The days seemed to drag on and on but eventually Christmas Eve came and my wife and I laid out the presents that Father Christmas would bring under the Christmas tree and headed to bed.

It was Christmas morning and my son was very excited about the presents he could see before him. I must confess that I’d been teasing him a little over the previous few weeks as he was fully aware that the Wii was in short supply and although it was on his ‘Christmas list’ I’d suggested that maybe he wouldn’t get one. To be honest, he really wasn’t expecting one underneath the tree………

……..the look on his face was a picture !! I don’t know who was more excited, him or me !!! it was one of his last presents to open and he was very surprised.

A result for the Wii so far……….

Later that morning we set the Wii up, after sorting out my wireless settings and running a couple of system updates on it, and started off with Wii Sports. I think both of us said ‘Wow’ at the same time, never had I played something that was so intuitive and involving, we had a couple of games of Bowling and both of us had permanent smiles on our faces the whole time. At this point I was dragged, under duress, into the kitchen to help out with the Christmas dinner leaving my nine year old son to play to his heart’s content.

Forty five minutes later I stuck my head back into the living room, the first thing I saw was that he was obviously still playing Wii Sports, but this time boxing, his words were ‘I’m winning, Dad’ and then I looked at him again. The sweat was pouring off him with all the exertion of swinging punches for over half an hour, but the permanent smile was still there.

………..another result for the Wii !!

On Boxing Day we had a family afternoon of playing Wii Sports and constructed a mini-Olympics with the most competitive game being Boxing, unsurprisingly. The competition culminated in me being defeated by my mother-in-law in the final of the boxing tournament – with hindsight I shouldn’t have been surprised but I certainly wasn’t impressed at the time !!

Over the Christmas period our favourite games were Wii Sports, Wii Play and Rayman Raving Rabbids – and as we approached 2007 what may come as a shock was that we still hadn’t loaded up Zelda – supposedly the game of the year !!

Friends and relations had been round (as they do over the Christmas period) and they’d all had a go on the Wii with the same levels of enjoyment – everyone wanted to play it!! I finally got my own back on the mother-in-law on the day before New Year’s Eve but it didn’t have the desired effect. Beating her at Super Monkey Ball Hoopla felt a little hollow in comparison. Damn !!

We were still playing the Wii for a number of hours a day – so much so that instead of going out on New Year’s Eve (babysitters are hard to come by these days) we stayed in, invited some family and friends and had a New Years Wii’ve Party (see what we did there ?). It was very competitive and highly enjoyable. I’m not even sure who won in the end but I do vaguely remember playing my sister-in-law at tennis at around 4am !!!

As we moved into 2007 we were still playing the Wii virtually every day and still we hadn’t loaded up Zelda. You may be thinking that I must be out of my mind if I wasn’t playing Zelda by now, but for some reason the other mini-games were still keeping mine and the family’s attention.

Towards the end of January my son purchased two other games – Pinball Classics and WarioWare – which re-ignited another few weekends of getting family and friends around to play more Wii – I’d never seen them so much !!!

If I’m honest WarioWare was a little disappointing (although the game is fantastic – as good as the other Wario outings, just a different style) and would have been better if it was multi-player ‘out of the box’. I’m told that if you complete the game on single player then you ‘unlock’ the multiplayer options but we haven’t got that far yet.

February came and we were still playing the Wii regularly (although not daily now – work, school and other activities getting in the way) and unbelievably we still hadn’t booted up Zelda yet. We’d been contemplating getting some more games (mainly Kororinpa and Excite Truck) but after reading mixed reviews of Excite Truck decided to pass on this. Kororinpa is still of interest and might be a future purchase soon.

So we almost get up-to-date, we’re coming to the end of March and are contemplating buying Sonic Rings and SSX Blur. The European release of the much-hyped and very expensive Playstation 3 is almost upon us and, according to news reports, is still not fully sold out with regard to pre-bookings, oh, and we still haven’t booted up Zelda – what is going on ?

The Wii is outselling both the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 worldwide by a significant margin and is still difficult to get hold of in the shops. Will the bubble burst? Is the Wii just a platform for mini-games and nothing more? Is this another Nintendo console that is aimed solely at children?.

If I can summarise, it is without a shadow of a doubt the most interactive and enjoyable Christmas we’ve had as a family for years. We’re still playing with the Wii, the mini-games are still holding our interest, .if I was the hardcore gamer as I used to be that could devote significant amounts of time to playing games maybe I’d have got bored by now – who knows. Now we tend to play games as a family rather than singularly and the interactive nature of the games is ideal for us.

There is a growing homebrew and modchip scene for the Wii which is unheard of at this period in a Nintendo console’s lifespan, there are some triple AAA titles coming in 2007, although not as many as some people would like – but the time period is fine for us as we wouldn’t want to necessarily buy a new game every month.

So, th’Wii’ months with a Revolution, what’s it been like ?

In a word – fantastic – better than I’d expected and made me remember how enjoyable Christmas used to be as a child (apart from feeling sick with all those chocolate tools !!).

Roll on 2007 and more innovative Wii games !!! Th’Wii’ cheers for Nintendo !!!

Jace’s Reply

Christmas seems to have added a rosey glow to Dave’s Wii experience. While I agree with many of the points he makes, my experience of the Wii was quite different.

Having pre-ordered most machines, i’m used to the excitement of a new console release, but I wasn’t really as excited for the release of Wii as I had been for the Gamecube or Nintendo 64. I think it was the journey into the unknown, would the controller really be as easy to use as we were led to believe. The first thing to impress me with the Wii was the box. With its slide out drawers and neat design, it has to be the best packaging of any console released so far. Then there is the size, it’s small enough to nestle in amongst your Sky box and DVD player, but without the stand, it’s a very plain unit.

I didn’t wait until Christmas to play the Wii, instead playing pretty much all the games within a couple of hours. Wii sports is fun for a while, I never felt the urge to throw my controller through the TV like those crazy Americans did, but maybe that’s because I wasn’t passionately enjoying it enough to put as much force into my movements. Wii play was my game of choice, the mini games all providing lots of fun until I realised the ultimate goal was to obtain Platinum medals, which considering my marathon attempts to get Gold, seemed impossible.

By the time i’d played the other games including Monkey Ball and Rayman, I was feeling exhausted. Not Physically, it was the mental strain of playing any more mini-games. It seems the Wii’s biggest curse is the Mini-game! I’m sure they appeal to casual gamers, and can be fun if played in groups, but the mini-game concept has become so tired and boring. We had to wait until February for Nintendo to release another game for the Wii, and what was it? Warioware - the king of Mini-games collections!

Of course, there are other games too, the almost interesting but hard to control Red Steel, and Zelda. Having finished all the previous Zelda games, this was the one I was looking forward to most. I could never say that the Twilight Princess is a bad game, but despite being a new game, you constantly feel like you’re re-treading old ground. Many hours and three dungeons later, the game is back on the shelf, untouched for months. Part of me is hoping i’ll go back and finish the story, the rest of me is looking for something better to do with my time. What a shame.

The major problem with the Wii is that the developers don’t know what to do with it. They just throw more mini-games at it, and hope some of them are good. I was looking forward to Korinpa, but after twenty minutes play you realise you’re just playing Monkey ball all over again. This game is over five years old, yet there are two attempts at it on the Wii, and neither retain the playability of the Gamecube original. Nintendo don’t seem to know what to do with it either. Fans will tell you it is early days, and there are great games in development, but with Zelda taking four years from announcement to release, they aren’t afraid to shout about work in progress. The current release schedule is poor by Nintendo’s own standards, Mario Galaxy being the only notable title, but that doesn’t look particularly innovative. The thought of playing it for any length of time with the Wii controller also fills me with dread.

Don’t get me wrong, I have got to grips with the controller. I’ve bashed it into my own chest while playing billiards, i’ve hula-hooped with it on Wario and i’ve held it like a gun on Red Steel. I haven’t enjoyed it though. Sure, you can, with care, replicate all the moves you’d do with a regular controller on the screen with it. However, after nearly thirty years of using joysticks and pads, that’s what I prefer, it’s what i’ve trained myself to use. I think it may be partially why i’ve tired of Zelda, it seems a lot more effort to play than the old games, swishing your right hand around for the sword may look great in the adverts, but it’s just repetitive and pointless.

Nintendo is marketing this console as a family entertainment centre, in a way it proves the fact that they don’t really care about the hardcore, and who can blame them. Serious gamers are such a small percentage of potential consumers. It’s hard to get your Mum to pick up your 360 Pad, but get them to wave this stick about and they love it. This is the party console, great for kids and parents to play together, who cares about anything else but fun!

Which brings us to the hardware, with Wii sports I initially thought the console was pretty powerful, as the graphics moved well and the resolution looked pretty good. Delving through the catalogue of games though reveals just how underpowered the Wii is. As someone who still plays Amiga games regularly, I certainly wouldn’t devalue games by their technical ability, but when compared to its competitors, the Wii is pretty awful. Screen resolution is dire, particularly on the front menu screen which you think would have received additional polish. Some of the games like Tony Hawks and SSX Blur trade speed for rough textures, while Red Steel highlights the lack of tendency for the graphics to look dark even when in outside, supposedly bright scenes. The omission of any HD connection is a serious fault.

The worst example of how bad the Wii is technically is Excite Truck. As a huge fan of the Excite bike series right from the NES days, this was one title I was really looking forward to. I had actually been playing Motorstorm on PS3 the week before, and when I loaded up Excite Truck I just laughed. I have this image of Shigeru Miyamoto and Reggie Fils-Aime checking out Motorstorm for the first time, and, mouths open, simultaneously saying, ‘oh f*ck’. You can not compare Wii with PS3, it is a bit like comparing an Audi A3 with a Segway.

In conclusion, I feel it’s a bit sad, there has been a fundamental change in the very fabric of the games industry. Nintendo have taken this very family centric viewpoint, which to be fair, seems to be working for them. They’ve created an innovative console ideally suited to mini-games, perfect for family parties. Whether this demographic will buy a game ever other week, only time will tell. At the same time, they’ve turned their back on their traditional hardcore audience, while at the same time giving us Zelda, like we’re a naughty dog they’ve left tied up in the yard, throwing us a bone as they leave, just to stop them feeling so guilty!

The positions have certainly changed around this hardware generation. It was only two generations ago with the Nintendo 64, that Nintendo had the most powerful console of the three competitors. This power inspired its developers to give us some of the greatest games ever made. Gamecube was second to the Xbox, but the gap was pretty close, Wind Waker still looks as impressive as anything from that era. Now there is a gaping hole between the 360 and the Wii in third place. Nintendo say they will make up for this technology gap with iconic new titles, as they did with the DS. Let’s hope they can, or there may be no Fanboys left for the next time round.