Nintendo Wii Review

Games and On-line Content

The Wii comes with Wii Sports, a simple sports game that includes baseball, tennis, golf, bowling, and boxing. You can play these games alone or if you purchase additional remotes, you can play with two to four players at a time, depending on the game.

These games are both fun and addictive. They make you get up in front of the TV and swing, throw, and jab. As shown in Figure 13, you can also purchase an optional sports pack to give the remote more of a bat, racket, or golf club. But even without this extra, the Wii sports games are realistic and satisfying.

Figure 13: Optional sports pack.

The Wii has an abundance of available games. There are many boxed games including those that feature classic Nintendo characters like Mario and Zelda. You can also purchase Wii points to buy online games.

When the Wii menu appears on the screen, you navigate using your Wii remote. There are a series of pages called Wii Channels. Among the Wii default channels are a weather channel, a news channel, a message channel, a photo channel, and a Mii channel.  The  first four are available only if your Wii is online. The Mii channel is available to everyone. A Mii is a cute little avatar that is used in playing Wii games. In the Mii channel you can customize your Mii to look like yourself, or any character that you can imagine.

The Wii gives you the ability to play online with your friends, but the online community and gaming options are a bit cumbersome, compared to the ease of online playing that is provided by other gaming devices like the Xbox or PS3.

There is also an Internet channel that uses a special version of Opera that is a free download. When surfing with the Wii you can enter URLs with the Wiimote and the Wii’s onscreen keyboard. Web pages render quite well and you can easily zoom in or out for comfortable reading. The Wii can now support a USB keyboard, which makes web browsing even easier.  New channels are being constantly added.

The Wii’s Virtual Console is used to provide online content. This features many classic video games that were originally available on systems like Nintendo 64 and Sega Genesis. There are currently over 100 games available and new ones are constantly added. You pay for these games in Wii points with each point equivalent to a U.S. penny. You can purchase points from Nintendo online. Nintendo uses a similar system for their DS games and unfortunately, the points are separate. Wii points can only be used for the Wii and separate DS points much be purchased for Nintendo DS games. Buying points and downloading programs is quick and easy.

The graphics in the Wii are simplistic and somewhat stilted compared to the realism and quality of the graphic display offered by the Xbox and the PSP3. However, playing the games is such fun that once you get involved in a game, you will find the graphics believable and fun.

The Wii not only cannot compare to the PS3 or the Xbox 360 in computing power, and it does not have a DVD or Blu-Ray player. This is a significant omission that some users will find unacceptable.

One thing to be aware of with the Wii is that is it location specific. So a Wii game purchased in the U. S. cannot be played on a Wii purchased in Brazil, England, Sweden, etc. We see no need for this to be the case and wish that Nintendo would remove this ridiculous constraint.