Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

Did you have a good Thanksgiving? I hope you did. Mine was alright, thanks. Would you like to hear about it? You do? Okay, well, to start off with, my flight to Florida went pretty-

What’s that? Skip the play-by-play and tell me about Nintendo’s Wii? Well, if you insist.

Here are the broad strokes. If you’re excited by the combination of the Wii’s innovative controller and Nintendo’s unorthodox strategy for this generation of digital entertainment then you are entirely justified. The Wii is tremendously fun. Let me emphasize tremendously fun. The controller really does seem to deliver on its promise, providing a genuinely new and surprisingly intuitive way to get things done in the game world. I am intrigued, even excited, by what future games may do with such a flexible controller.

To start off, Nintendo has you create a Mii, which is an adorable, Weeble-like representation of your digital self. Mixing and matching eyes, hair, and heads, you can create a surprisingly good likeness of yourself. I began to refer to my father’s Mii as Virtual Dad, because it’s hilarious. You can create any number of little Miis, and they’ll show up as selectable players in Wii Sports. The Miis are a great personal touch for a game like this, friendly as they are, and I sincerely hope that Nintendo does more with them in the future.

So, Wii Sports. It’s six or so different games in one, with the bowling standing out as a personal favorite. It’s remarkable how fast you adjust to the controller. Wii Baseball was a disaster for me until I stopped trying for the usual kind of videogame timing and instead kept my eye on the ball and swung appropriately.

Twilight Princess? Yes. Now and forever, yes. I conceded to reality that it would be impossible to beat the entire game over one extended weekend, but I nevertheless managed to log twelve hours of game time, successfully completing two major dungeons. Yes, I know you can probably do much better than two dungeons in half a day. Shut up. As usual, this latest entry in the Zelda series polishes the tried and true mechanics of the earlier games while expanding them in great new ways. Link’s iron boots not only help him sink to the bottom of a body of water, as they did in Ocarina of Time, but now can also magnetize him to specific walls and ceilings (it all looks very cool). Released simultaneously for both the Wii and the Gamecube, some people say that the support for the Wii Remote feels tacked on. I’m here to tell you that these people are liars. There is something immensely satisfying about unsheathing Link’s sword with a casual flick of the wrist. Likewise, aiming a bow and arrow is no longer an exercise in torture for me.

While I give an eleven out of a possible ten stars to the Wii’s control scheme and execution, I’m not in the best position to discuss its graphics. We know the Wii is underpowered compared to the ominously humming supercomputers of the 360 and the PS3, and surely, we won’t see games that fully exploit the Wii’s graphics for at least a year. Twilight Princess looks wonderful, particularly when you’re in the “twilight”, but since it’s also supposed to be compatible with the Gamecube’s hardware it would be foolish to say that this represents the Wii’s full potential. Wii Sports, while a ton of fun, won’t be winning any awards in the special effects department. So, we’ll see.

The Wii got shown off while the extended family was over for Thanksgiving. None of the adults had the guts to give it a try in front of other people, but everyone seemed genuinely interested in how the thing worked and what it could do. They also seemed to “get” what was going on, once you explained that the thing is essentially motion controlled. Everyone looked like they secretly wanted to give the system a try, except for Grandma, who fell asleep in her chair. Grandmas will do that, though.

So, I agree with what has been said elsewhere. I still worry that the Wii could wind up gathering dust as a novelty item, repeating the mistake of the Gamecube’s small game catalog. It also seems that the controllers eat batteries like candy, though I think my family was repurposing partially used ones. Bottom line, the system is fun in a way that I haven’t experienced since the days of the Super Nintendo. It’s such immense fun to play and it’s so easy to use (even my dad has started playing Zelda again) that it’s got huge potential as the ultimate party machine. I want one.