Wii impressions

(this is just about my initial impressions of the hardware. I haven't tried Wii Sports yet and a full Zelda review is going to have to wait for a while)

I wish I had pictures for this, but my camera's at home.

The first thing you notice about the Wii is it's size: it's tiny. The much bandied about figure is "the size of 3 DVD cases" and that's pretty accurate. It's not light - I'd guess around 5 pounds or so - but when laid on its side it looks like a small CD burner.

The Wiimote itself fits very naturally in the hand - your pointer finger curves naturally on the B button, with the rest of your fingers resting underneath. It's a tiny bit heavier than a standard remote, but not much moreso. It was perfectly natural for me to hold it in either hand (which I did quite often). You can create up to 100 avatars, and there's a special feature where you can let your avatars wander over to seperate Wiis and have different avatars wander onto yours. If you see one you like, you can grab it and add it to your library.

The main thing that surprised me about the nunchuck was how light it is - it seriously almost feels hollow. The curved grip works alright, although i found my middle/ring fingers cramping up a bit during Zelda. I don't know if this was due to me gripping it too hard or what.

Once you've assembled all the cables (standard console stuff, other than the placement of the tiny, unobtrusive sensor bar) and turned on the console, you immediately are sucked in. Moving the cursor onscreen with the remote just feels so natural, especially because they've programmed in a slight rumble when your cursor moves over a new option. This force feedback gives a tactile definition to something as normal as navigating menus, and it has a huge effect on your experience. It sounds stupid, but it really does make a difference.

Once you've started up, you get a selection of channels, including Photos, Weather, News, and Shopping. The weather and news channels weren't up on launch day (neither was the Opera browser download) so I can't really talk about them. I didn't try out the Photo Channel either. What I did try out was the Mii channel.

The Mii channel allows you to create little Playskool style avatars for certain games like Wii Sports or WarioWare. There's a large amount of options to customize your charater, although I'm sure everyone will find at least one important thing Nintendo left out (my personal peeve: apparently only women can have a ponytail. There are several handsome, virile men with ponytails, dammit!). I only made 1 or 2 Miis, but I can see spending a lot of time with this in the future.

Getting things set up and online is a snap - there were a few updates to download that took ~10 mins, but the only error I encountered was that at one point I needed to reset the console to get it to recognize the pointer (another cool thing - if you rotate the controller along the long axis, the hand onscreen will rotate as well. That's another example of the cool little touches Nintendo's been putting on here). This gave me access to the shop, where I could buy a few titles from NES, SNES, Genesis and N64. The only ones that stood out were Sonic, Altered Beast and Super Mario 64, but I'm sure everyone will have their favorites (Sim City for SNES was a puzzling one, however). I didn't buy one yet (that would mean less time for Zelda) but when I do I'll be sure to write about it.

Even with these first initial impressions, it's clear that Nintendo has taken a page from Apple's design sense and chosen to create a polished, soft lighted interface that's simple, clear, and really fun to use. I know the system will ultimately live or die on its games, but the initial interface gives me a huge amount of confidence in how Nintendo will treat their customers in the future.