Whee!
We are probably the most undeserving people on the planet, but we got a Wii! For the uninitiated, Wii is Nintendo’s new gaming system, released on Sunday, November 19. Amazon sold out in less than one minute.
I say undeserving because it only really came onto my radar as a serious blip sometime last week. I’ve been reading Cabel Sasser’s blog over the past year, and so it was probably through him that I learned about the Wii’s innovative motion-sensing Remote and Nun-chuck controllers. When we went over to Ben & Robert’s house, played some Wario Ware on the Nintendo GameCube, and watched a little promotional video for Wii Sports, we were sold. It didn’t hurt that Glenn@Brother was also seriously interested in getting one.
Keep in mind, this is being written by a person who has never much liked console video games. I played a bit on NES, and had one of those cartridge cheat things (Game Genie?), and maybe played a few pitiful games of Sonic, but otherwise… I was pretty good at Daytona USA on Sega Saturn. Anyway. Computer games were much more my thing.
The release date for the Wii was November 19 — Sunday — so I took some time to research our options for getting it. Amazon wasn’t taking pre-orders, and people in the forums seemed to think it the lines wouldn’t be so bad; that you could just show up maybe 30 minutes ahead of time. The reasoning was that this was a Wii, not a PS3. (This advice turned out to be dead wrong.) We hatched a plan to attempt to obtain one at a 24-hour Walmart’s midnight release, 7am at another Walmart, and failing both of those, 10am at some other store.
Our Saturday evening engagement ran a little longer than anticipated, so we found ourselves rolling into Walmart at right about midnight. We soon found that even if we’d been there two hours ahead of time, we would be leaving empty-handed: all 20 Wii had been spoken for as of 9am that morning, when people began lining up. Still, we stayed in line (at around position Nos. 35 & 36), until the manager announced that there were no more Wii. So much for “You don’t need to be there more than a half hour ahead of time.”
While we were in line, though, Jessica’s brother Jeff called to tell us he was #11 in line at Target! Even better, he was only there for the spectacle of the whole thing, and to spend time with his friend who was #7, not to actually buy one. (!!!) We placed our order, amazed at our good fortune. And then we went home and went to sleep.
We later found out that Jeff had a very cold night camping out in front of Target in a few layers of sweaters, seated in a lawn chair with a slew of drunken teenagers who apparently had the first few slots. When the sun rose, the line straightened up with anticipation, apparently organized by an area soccer mom, and everybody was escorted into the store in an orderly fashion where our Wii, one (of 12 available) Legend of Zelda, and an extra remote (controller) pair were purchased.
After a day out and about, we drove up to Alpharetta to fetch the Wii at the in-laws’ place, and cranked it up for our first plays of the game that comes with the Wii, Wii Sports. First up was bowling, where you use a swinging motion with the remote to send the ball rolling down the lane. A little awkward at first, we quickly got the hang of it, four of us playing a great 10 frames of bowling. It was pretty much immediately clear that the Wii was really something special: the motion-sensing controls have amazing potential, and they’re already being put to great use.
After bowling, we tried a bit of golf, which was similarly delightful. Where most golf games test your timing skill by stopping a swinging power meter, with Wii Sports Golf you actually stand like a golfer and swing the remote, the characteristics of your stroke actually controlling how the ball is driven. It’s really effective, with possible exception of the putter, which can be difficult to control correctly with such small movements.
Finally, we wore ourselves out with the boxing game (in part due to our not understanding how the controls were supposed to be held or work). For boxing you use the Nun-chuck as well as the remote, with the remote acting as your dominant hand, the Nun-chuck as your other. Holding them together in front of your face blocks your face, punch by jabbing the controllers out into the air, and sway them from side to side to block and dodge. Very cool. And frankly a bit tiring. (We hadn’t even tried baseball and tennis.)
As an aside, while the Wii Sports games are a lot of fun in a multiplayer setting, some of them (like boxing) lack the AI to make them real single-player games. I did have a few nice 3-hole rounds of golf this evening, and I can imagine that bowling would be fun as well.
We’ve also been playing Legend of Zelda, which started out interesting, but not all that great, and after a couple hours of play has bloomed it a much more interesting game as the controls (which are an order of magnitude more complicated than Wii Sports) make more sense. The sword-fighting is done by various swooshes and shakes of the remote and nun-chuck, some in combination with buttons, fishing done by ‘casting’ the remote, etc. (Jessica has just wrapped up her playing for the evening, and a pretty amazing trailer ran with dozens of scenes from the game. To quote her: “No wonder this is such a sought-after game!” There looks to be a lot more to it than we’ve seen so far.)
I do wish there were more [whimsical] games available now, Elebits among them (thanks to Ben for pointing it out to me), but I guess that’s what you get for being an early-adopter.
So while we may not have paid adequate gaming-world dues to own such a fine (and extremely reasonably-priced) piece of gaming equipment — suffering through months and months of rumors and speculation about the new system and its games — I do feel like we are sufficiently enjoying the Wii enough to justify it. Perhaps it was, in the words of Glenn@Work, “Just clean living.”
While I’m quoting, I’ll leave you with quote from Mike, in the vocal stylings of the Carpenters: “Wii’ve only just begun…”