G-pinions

I arrived home from NYC yesterday afternoon to find Wii on my bed. After very carefully setting up and caressing the system and it's various attachments/genitals, I booted it up. Despite having played quite a bit of Wii at E3 earlier this year, there was a very distinct pleasure navigating the system from the confines of my couch for the first time.

The main system menu is a pleasure to navigate, and using the Wiimote is intuitive, responsive, and thanks to some cleverly-implemented rumble, surprisingly visceral. Dan and I spent a solid hour making Miis of the six people who would be playing Wii Sports at one point or another yesterday; the Mii creator is a blast, and can be shockingly accurate in it's recreations of your friends/family/random celebrities. I'll post some real-life comparisons in my next Wii update.

The only online channel right now is the Virtual Console, with a dozen or so games ready to go right now. I'll probably grab Super Mario 64 when things are slower, and Super Mario World when it's up, but outside of those there really aren't any old-school games that I need to re-buy simply for the nicety of immediate access. Especially when, thus far, they don't even supply the luxury addition of online multiplayer, a standard set firmly on XBL. I understand that it wouldn't be quite the same without the entire friends list/matchmaking process that we're used to, but putting Bomberman on there with only local multiplayer is a damn cruel tease. As tragically mediocre as Small Arms is (added today to XBL Arcade), I would MUCH rather support indie development than tell Nintendo I'm willing to accept paying too much for untouched "classics". I am looking forward to Wii Porn though. Er, I mean the Opera web browser.

Wii Sports does a pretty solid job of introducing you to the system right out of the gate. Bowling, Tennis, Golf, Boxing and Baseball, in descending order of quality (says I), are immediately accessible, and if nothing else elegantly communicate that building a gaming console around the subtleties of human movement is an idea worth keeping an open mind about.

Zelda, unfortunately, does not define the system. I can't tell you after six hours and one dungeon whether it's a great game or not, but I can tell you that it's not worth buying the system for if it's your only point of interest and you already own a Gamecube. Sure, some of the more skillful motions like projectiles are obviously more gratifying when the aim is 100% manual, but I'm not even sure if the experience would suffer at all if played on the GC - the system it was obviously developed for. People raving about how great a launch game it is are missing the bigger picture - the only reason we have a game like this at launch is because Nintendo spent so much time on it during the last generation. That said, it should satisfy gamers and new mainstream Wii inductees equally, which is really all Nintendo seems to be caring about initially.

There's definitely a DS launch vibe at the moment, where the hardware is one step ahead of the software, but hopefully we'll see it come into it's own in about six months just as it's younger portable brother did. I'm very happy with my purchase right now, and I'm not trying to get down on it - I just have impossibly high, industry-changing hopes for the system, and it has a very long way to go.