Wii impressions

Wii impressions
Mood: busy
Posted on 2006-12-11 16:41:00
Tags: ljbackup wii
Words: 834

So I got a Wii on Friday, and as you'd expect, djedi and I spent a long time playing it. But maybe not in ways you'd expect!

So we unpacked it and set it up, etc. I had played with a Wii Remote (i.e. controller) in stores before, but it's a lot easier to control it when you're at a "normal" distance from the TV and sitting down. The main interface is really a pleasure to play with - you get a slight rumble every time you roll over a button, which is a nice touch.

Anyway, the first thing we did (after updating the firmware) is create Miis for ourselves. A Mii is a little graphical representation of yourself - you get to choose the hair, face shape, etc., etc. I'm not very good at such things but it was kinda fun, and the results are at least recognizable!

After friending omega697 and others, we played around with Wii Sports (the pack-in title). It's kinda neat because you play as your Mii :-) There are five sports that come with it - here they are, ordered by how much I liked it:

Baseball: I had a ton of fun with baseball. It's fairly simplistic - you only pitch on defense and hit on offense (fielding and baserunning are automatic). But, man, swinging the remote like a bit to hit is a freaking blast. Pitching is also fun - you control the kind of pitch (fastball, curveball, screwball, and splitter (I think)), the location (by using the D-pad) and how hard it's thrown by, well, making a throwing motion with the Wiimote. My right arm is quite sore from all the throwing. But in a good way! I haven't tried it two-player since we played it the first time (and didn't really know what we were doing), but it's fun against the computer!

Tennis: Another deceptively simple one, in that you don't move your Mii, but just swing at the appropriate time. But you control the direction and speed, as well as spin (which I haven't quite mastered) by swinging the Wiimote like a racket. This worked well with two people (every match is doubles, so we both controlled two Miis each), but I bet it would be a lot of fun with four.

Bowling: Here you control where you stand, the direction you throw, as well as speed and spin. The results are fairly realistic, which means that I'm not terribly good. There are some fun challenge modes, though, even if my ball always curves to the left...

Golf: Meh. Hold the Wiimote like a golf club and swing. The problem with this one is that it's really hard to hit the ball softly, which means putting is a nightmare for me.

Boxing: This one looks neat, but the game don't seem to pick up the controls very accurately. Also, it's incredibly tiring, at least the way I was swinging around wildly...

The two games we had bought were Super Monkey Ball and the new Zelda. We haven't started the new Zelda yet, but we did bust out a little bit of Monkey Ball. Overall, I'm a little disappointed. The main mode (you tilt the Wiimote to move the level) is OK but I have more dexterity in my thumbs then I do in my whole hand, so everything seems harder. (and I hear the levels get crazy hard quickly) But, I really bought it for the 50(!) party games. We've only had time to play through 15-20 or so, and for some of those we were calibrating the Wiimote wrong, which may explain why many of them just didn't seem to work at all. I guess we'll have to reevaluate them... (we've been scoring them out of 5 so we can remember which the good ones are, since there seem to be plenty of duds and uninteresting ones) Anyway, poor control leads to a lot of frustration.

We also bought the original NES Zelda through the Virtual Console and played through it.(passed it last night!) It's a lot of fun - good game, and it is more fun playing it on a controller and TV screen than through an emulator on the computer. It's emulated very well - even the slowdowns when too many enemies come on the screen. For added fun, a third party will be making adapters so you can play the Wii with NES or SNES controllers, which is kinda neat.

Anyway, the gist of it is that I've enjoyed it a lot, and I'm looking forward to trying it out with more people come the holidays, assuming I can find two more Wiimotes and nunchucks. I'm still in the gimmicky phase (anything motion sensing is cool!) so we'll have to see how it fares with Zelda, etc.

On a non-Wii note, I hope to have LJBackup finished before I leave for the holidays. (next Friday) A bit optimistic, but I did some more stuff on it this weekend so there isn't too much left to do...

2 comments

Comment from omega697:
2006-12-11T16:00:19+00:00
The new Zelda is really great. That is all.

Comment from djedi:
2006-12-11T18:11:26+00:00
The Miis are something I didn't know about beforehand. It's sorta like a way, for many games, to store all your data in a portable, cute format. You can send a copy of these miis over to other people's systems so you can play when you're visiting them and so "they" can be on your baseball team and such. :) You can even store a copy in a wii-mote and take it with you when you go visit someone. I wonder if you will be able to always carry around your stats for the new Smash Bros this way and such.

This backup was done by LJBackup.