The New Road

Another Wii Round

Joe brought over the Wii again for poker night. I was so tired that I would have rather spent what little time I had in me before sleep playing Wii instead of poker. But we played some poker and a little Wii.

This time Winsha got to try it out and I think she was instantly hooked. I think Lori is bought in as well, it's just a question of when to get one. I'd like to get it before we go to see Cooper and Jack up in Oregon. It would be wonderful for my sister to see that video games can be a family activity once again.

I'm finding it hard to explain Wii to people. It's so easy to talk about pixels, frame rates, hard drives and graphics chips. But that is not where the Wii competes. The Wii certainly fails there in comparison to the 360 and the PS3. But where it rules without peer is the funness factor. That the games are actually fun.

It also fixes what I would call the parity problem in video games. A video game can be multiplayer, but the owner of the game is likely to be a lot more skilled than any person off the street. So even though you can play together, it's usually just one person schooling the other. Not so in the sports games on the Wii. Experienced players and inexperienced players seem to have more parity with each other.

Take bowling as an example, I'm still working on a flat spin technique while Joe is working on a mean hook technique. And the game is designed such that, as with real life, you don't really know what will effect the spin on the ball. There is a kind of a mystery to it. And that keeps it really interesting.

Same thing with all of the sports games. And I can certainly see how someone could get so into to the motion of a game like Wii Tennis in the virtual world, that they would want to pick up a racket and try it in the real world.

Joe said something interesting last night about the sports games and how he thought that enthusiasts for a particular sport, say golf, would get the Tiger Woods games and not play the Wii game. Maybe so. But I think for most people having the games simplified to the point of Wii Sports is actually better. I really love the design of the games and how many features were left out. I love that in tennis you just swing the racket and don't worry about moving around. That turns the game from something that takes hours to even become competent at, to something you can pick up and start playing right away. It's genius.

Enough said about Wii at the moment... Suffice to say, huge fan.