Sunday, 25 February 2007
Our Wii-k end
After many weeks of frustration, we are at last the proud owners of a Wii! A new video game store opened in Valenciennes this week, and calculating that they would be sure to have Wiis on stock when they opened, and that (unlike all the other stores), they could not yet have a pre-order list, we arranged to be there when the doors opened yesterday, and were the first customers of the new Score Game, Valenciennes. To see how our whole Wii-opening experience unfolded, invited guests can watch our video of us unpacking, installing, and playing the Wii for the first time.
For games, so far we have Wii Sports, Wii Play, and Madden 2007. I'm planning on picking up Zelda tomorrow.
Madden is a lot of fun with the Wii controls, and not having access to American sports here, I have really been looking forward to having this game to compensate. My Bears will win it all in the big game! But it is really involving with the Wii controls; snapping the ball, passing and kicking, even juking and stiff arming are all a lot more engrossing when they involve actual movement. The EA sports games are often criticised for putting out the same game year after year, but the fact that they were able to make such a good version of Madden for the Wii deserves real credit. So far I've played two exhibition games, and won 7-3, and 7-0, respectively. Scores like that make my old-school NFC heart glad; time was when football video games had so much trouble being realistic that it was actually hard to finish a game with less than fifty points on the board.
We haven't done much with Wii Play yet; some of the games like shooting and laser hockey have promise as time wasters, but it isn't really anything to write home about. It came included with the second controller, though, so it's hardly worth criticising—it was a freebie.
Wii Sports is really, really good. Much more than you would expect given the primitive graphics. Tennis and bowling are both great, and baseball is surprisingly complete. We haven't even played golf yet. But the real stand-out surprise was boxing. I'd heard some complaints about the game on-line from people who found it too tiring and such, but as a game that is immensely satisfying to play—and a huge stress reducer—for Emilie and me both it was a real revelation. Very satisfying stuff.
The best surprises for me have been the good uses the internal speaker in the remote gets put to. It's neat to have the thwack of the racket when you hit the tennis ball or the "hut! hut!" before you snap the ball coming from the controller. I'd heard the sound quality described as "hallmark-card quality" so I was glad that it is actually much better than that.
The other cool surprise was how different the gameplay feels to playing a traditional video game; it's a totally different experience, and so I think having both the DS and the Wii is a very complimentary proposition. Emilie is still working her way through Mario 64 and I'm still playing Final Fantasy V Advanced, but the Wii adds a whole new type of game to play.
So, no buyer's remorse so far. Besides the games, we've played around a bit with the Wii channels, and browsed the Virtual Console, which will probably get some business from us once we've gone through a few of our Wii games. Mario Kart 64 and Gunstar heroes have caught my eye, as well as The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time; but it will be a while before I'll have time to play any of those, so I'll hold off for now.
