Wii the Revolution, wii support it!!!

Gamers are often stereotyped as couch potatoes, sitting in their bedrooms, staring intensely at a screen. Game enthusiasts were eagerly queuing up to have a go at flicking their wrists or swinging their arms. The reason is for the new Nintendo Wii (we). The Japanese games giant has turned its back on the typical game pad with buttons and changed to using motion sensors. The right-hand controller is shaped like a slim TV remote, while the left-hand one is rounded and curvy.

Nintendo is giving people the chance to try out the controls for themselves with 27 games for the Wii available to play. After looking at the style of use, the initial results are surprisingly promising. It would probably take a couple of misses to connect your actions with the anime characters on the TV screen. But within a few minutes, it would be fairly easy to smash the ball and win matches. The game also quickly revealed that it was not just a case of vague, random movements, as many critics thought.

A rapid swing would increase the power of the shot. And turning the controller at an angle would produce a topspin or slice.

Another of the games on offer was golf. Here the device becomes the club and the force of a drive is determined by how far back you swing the controller. Again, the realism of the experience was impressive. In particular, putting involved controlled strokes, determined by how much you moved the device.

Most fans of shooters prefer to play with a computer mouse and keyboard due to the degree of control this offers. On the Wii, the right-hand controller lets you point and shoot. The left-hand holds the so-called nunchuck, which has a joystick for movement. The unconventional set-up takes a while to get used to, especially as it is easy to wander off to one side of the screen by unwittingly moving the controller sideways. But the point and shoot mechanism works well and adds a degree of realism. Whereas in other games reloading involves pressing a particular button, here a flick of the wrist is enough. The swordplay was similarly intuitive - swing the right hand to strike and move the left hand to block.

The controls worked less well on other shooters. The principles were broadly the same, but some of the action also involved a number of button combinations. Over time, gamers will probably get used to this but it did not have the same pick and
play appeal as the sports games.

Initially, it does feel a little strange to wave your arms around. And the remote worked best with the sport titles. But hey, now at lest there is some exercise involved. Who knows, maybe your parents won’t nag you to go outside and exercise, when you can do it inside. I think that all ages would enjoy this console. It is the cheapest of the 3 newest consoles (Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and Nintendo Wii) and is probably the one worth buying right now. It may not have the better graphic as the others, but it is a welcome change to how we game, a “revolution” as it has been called. Nintendo may have just produced a way of playing games that is fits the cliché - easy to play, hard to master.

Signed,
Daniel