I just got back home from my glorious friend Ryan’s house, where he introduced me to the Wii. Thus, I shall expound on it.

We played Wii Sports, as he didn’t have any other two-player games, so keep in mind this is only reflective of Wii Sports on the Wii, not any other title.

After the first 10 minutes of “Holy shit! The pointer turns UPSIDE DOWN when I turn my hand UPSIDE DOWN!” and “Ahhh! It moves like me!” I got into the groove, while still being pretty damn excited. This console has a ton of potential, provided the design is done well. Ryan said that golf sucked, so we stuck to bowling, tennis, boxing and baseball. Overall, I prefer boxing or tennis, although I’m much better at boxing. Ryan likes baseball. I was struck hard at the intuitiveness of the game. Some things had to be taught, like in baseball you press certain buttons to pitch the ball particular ways. I loved how intuitive tennis felt, when your character moved around for you and all you had to do was swing the racket. In boxing, I think I felt more in control than I have in any game. However, there’s no point in ranting how awesome it is, because I could go on and on.

Criticism:

There is, quite obviously, so much under-potential here. I began to notice that, while it seems like the characters are following your exact moves, they actually determine what type of move you are doing, and use that instead. For example, in baseball, a twitch will do instead of a full-fledged swing. I also noticed that during tennis, after sweating my ass off while swinging the Wiimote left and right, Ryan told me to calm down and just twitch my hand. Sure enough, twitching does it. It actually doesn’t even matter which way you twitch your hand. The timing is more important than direction. Bowling got boring rather fast for more, but I’m not a bowler anyway. During boxing, I actually won 8 AI matches in a row, propelling my Mii‘s skill level up higher and higher. When the crowd cheered, I would raise my hands up high, but my avatar did not respond. How cool would it have been if it had raised its hand too, and the crowd had cheered louder? When you win a round, there’s some deliciously funky music that comes on as the camera pans around your avatar. The music just DEMANDS dancing, but the avatar only responds by lamedly continuing to punch. I want to fucking dance! Why put dance music in there, and not let me dance? WHY?!

All in all, a great title for some quick fun, especially for non-gamers. I can see its just BARELY scratching the surface, though.

Now, I clearly haven’t see that many Wii games come out, but I do hope that they continue to be well designed. Hopefully, the direct accelerometer data from the Wiimote comes straight into gameplay, not a simplified version. In my opinion, bastardizing such a beautiful wealth of real-world mineable data is, really, a huge waste. One can only dream.