Initial Wiipressions

Cyndi and I finally opened the Wii after it sat under the tree since November (got to love anticipation). My sister, her fiance, and my dad were over for an early Christmas celebration before we leg it on up to Rhode Island next week, so the feeling of opening and playing the new system on something like Christmas day brought back some fond childhood memories. Watching my dad swing the wiimote around and beating all of us in bowling will certainly make some new one.

So first impressions, in bullet form:

• Wii Sports is fun in a group, but even in a group, I can see it growing old
• You can bowl ten frames solo in about two minutes
• Baseball is probably my least favorite in the package, but Andrew loved it, so it's probably me not getting it
• It's hilarious to watch people box each other
• You don't need multiple controllers to have fun. When the fam was over Saturday morning, we only had one (they're impossible to find) and were able to pass the controller around for most of the games. Baseball we just switched off, same with boxing. Tennis, we didn't play much.
• Designing Mii's is both time consuming and stupidly fun
• And then there's Zelda...

I haven't played Zelda myself, just watched Cyndi played, but she's already clocked in a sizable chunk of playtime. What's remarkable is that she's never really shown much more than a passing interest in video games, and here she is, swinging the wiimote and bad guys and caught up in the mentality that all gamers know of -- you know, the one that finds you thinking, "Only one more level and I'll stop." I think that a lot of the accessibility lies on the wiimote's control. Growing up using buttons to manipulate actions on the screen has given it the feel of being natural when really it can be awkward for a new gamer. When Cyndi freaks out because a bat is attacking her, the natural instinct is to swing something at it. Now, that frantic slashing actually works.

Anyway, first impressions are set down. I look forward to seeing how the system develops in the months to come (oh, and watching my in-laws play it).

I'll post picture later.