posted on Thursday, January 11, 2007 5:49 AM
by
Endie
Nintendo Wii - First Impressions
With two of the many, many Davids in my work giving the Nintendo Wii such positive reviews (the word "raving" might not rest uneasily in a description of their opinions), I decided to give it a try. To give an idea of the difficulties that lie in wait for the would-be wii owner, the process went like this: Murray's wife spotted some being delivered to Game at the Gyle in Edinburgh, and picked one up for him. He passed the word on to me, but the intervening 10 minutes saw the rest sell out. However, the sales assistant suggested trying their St James branch, whose deliveryas later. Sure enough, six had been deposited there scant minutes before, and by the time I got there by taxi (ten more, tense minutes) there was one left. Gotcha.
Apparently the St James Centre branch - a very small and less-known outlet - gets around one hundred calls every morning about availability. Nintendo have played this one very well indeed, so far.
Anyhow, on getting the console home I tried out Wii Sports. Tennis was great fun. The radical change in experience made possible by the motion-sensitive controller reminded me of the novelty of the first time I played console tennis (with a white dot and two white bars for rackets) back in 1980 or so. It was a genuinely new gaming experience to play a game by actually, well, playing the game: flicking the wrist forward as I play the ball to add topspin; reaching over my head to serve, changing my body position to play backhand strokes: hilarious stuff and really natural-feeling.
Next was Golf. The graphical quality of the course was, of course, no Tiger Woods. But EA - who I hate and loathe with a jihadist's zeal - couldn't dream of making something so fun (unless last year's model was identically fun, of course). It was immediately apparent that the best and most accurate way to play the game was to stand up and actually play the golf stroke "for real", remembering to play with a steady downswing and controlled follow-through.
Bowling was astonishingly accurate: I bowled pretty much the score I would with an actual ball, and found myself with the same right-to-left drift cause by spin from my wrist-movement. It is difficult not to let oneself make the same follow-through and stand there, as if one had just released a real bowling ball in a real alley, waiting for the clatter of success.
I'll post more about the other games I bought (Rayman's Raving Rabbits - typical Nintendo weirdness but fun-looking - and Zelda) when we get bored enough of the freebie bundle to try them out..