I hope everyone’s holiday season was a good one.
Like many people, much of my effort was expended on searching for the ever-elusive Nintendo Wii console, made worse by the fact that I was actually on the look-out for two of them.
The first I hunted for while I was up in Washington, right after the initial launch. I called multiple stores - none of which had any, and the clerks were astoundingly tight-lipped on providing details (possibly because they don’t know, but just as likely because they were planning on snapping them up for themselves).
Finally, I tracked down a rumor that a local-ish chain (ShopKo) would have some on “Black Friday”, a day typically reserved for insane people looking for marginal deals on cheap consumer electronics and other crap. I typically stay far away from places of commerce for at least a week past Thanksgiving, but I was on a mission so I somehow found myself in the front of ShopKo at 3 AM in the morning, freezing my ass off surrounded by a bunch of middle-aged housewives looking to buy cheap DVD players or whatever.
Anyhow, 6 AM rolls around and I can barely feel my toes when the doors open and people start heading inside. I’m at the front of the line and any thought of simply walking to the electronics section quickly dissipates when the herd behind me starts charging. Insane. I make it to the counter in one piece only to find that they had no Wiis in stock and wouldn’t until later in the day - at some undetermined time.
Dejected, I drive off and happen to pass a local EB Games and find a guy standing out in front of it. Still half frozen from my previous adventure I park and ask the guy what he knew. EB Games planned to get 3 consoles, and I was second in line. That worked for me, so I stood my ground as other people began lining up. A couple hours later the doors open, we get tickets (well, the first 6 of us - apparently they had a larger shipment than they had thought) and I come home with a Wii.
Flash ahead to mid-December - I needed another Wii. Christmas is coming up and I had planned to split the cost of a Wii with my mom to give to my nieces. I try multiple stores, hoping that demand had slackened. No such luck. I even stood in line in front of Target to get one, but they were out by the time they got to me. I had a chance to get a Playstation 3, but I declined (because Sony sucks).
Coming to terms with the fact that I might not end up getting that second Wii in time for the holidays, I went with a gamble: Amazon, which had been pretty lousy about keeping them in stock, was running a sweepstakes for a chance to buy a Wii. The odds ended up being 1-in-28, but Glenna and I both had separate Amazon accounts so this was lessened to 1-in-14. Still pretty long odds. Despite that, though, I was able to score a Wii. The timing sucked so my nieces would get their console a couple of days late, but in the end it turned out better than I had expected.
…
As for the Wii itself, my impressions are that it’s a whole lot of fun, but it’s going to take some time before there are many great titles to play on it. The new Zelda is good and Rayman is amusing as hell, but there just aren’t that many must-have games for it yet (to be fair, that’s pretty much true of every other console immediately after release, but Nintendo has always had issues with game diversity and availability).
While a lot has been said about how innovative the controls are, they are also somewhat limiting - and will probably have a limiting effect on what kinds of games actually make it for the Wii.
You’d think the Wiimote would be good for first-person shooters, but you’d be wrong - the single analog stick makes strafing impossible and it takes longer to target. I’m also not really convinced that platform games really benefit all that much from the Wiimote. In such games, its use seems a bit gimmicky. It’d be almost the perfect control for a real-time strategy game - something that hasn’t really been common on consoles - but the lack of high definition support pretty much cuts that possibility down.
So - I really don’t see this as being my only current generation console in the long term, though it’s more or less perfect for ‘party’ games and obviously this is the only place you’re going to get your fix of Nintendo’s flagship gaming titles (Mario, Zelda, Metroid, etc). I’m one of those guys who is pretty much obligated to get every console Nintendo releases based on that fact alone.
As a matter of principle I’m also happy to see Nintendo trying something different and new with console hardware, rather than just sticking with the same-thing-with-better-graphics treadmill the other guys have been on for years. Innovation is hard to find in the gaming industry, especially if you have to depend on the likes of Sony and Microsoft to provide it. It’s just that along with this particular innovation, Nintendo may have pigeon-holed their console into being suitable for a limited style of games - a mistake they also made with both the Gamecube and the N64, to their detriment. I hope I’m wrong.
