Okay, everyone together now…Wiiiiiiii! I went to the Nintendo press conference and was wowed by just how fun the whole thing looked. I mean, old men were even smiling at the dang thing, so of course I couldn’t wait to get my hands on the sucker.

Well, it took two days for that sucker, because I wasn’t about to wait in line three or four hours in that hot filth. So thankfully I got to be involved with a Nintendo appointment and got to play the Wii myself.

The Wii is a sleek and stylish system that is this pearl white and looks fantastic just sitting there. Everyone knows by now the game controls based on your movement, but what many didn’t know was that there is no little sticky circles you have to place on your television, but rather there is this long black bar that you either place on the top or bottom of your screen; this just sits on top or in front of the bottom most of your television. In other words…the Wii isn’t an eye sore that won’t look nice sitting in your fancy old apartment.

There are two parts to the controller, the “chuk” that is an attachment that has your analog stick, and then there is the Wii remote. Most of the action is done with this portion, so be sure you get your arms in good condition before this sucker comes out. To give an idea on the various uses, you can swing it forward to do such things as hit a tennis ball over a net or make Zelda stab his sword forward. You can also shake the controller to do things like make Mario attack and use warp stars.

The coolest little bonus feature is the fact that the controller has its own audio, so when you pull back Link’s bow you’ll hear that string tighten, and then once you let go you’ll hear the twang. It is something so minor in theory, but really adds to the immersion.

Now, for the bad…it seems iffy. You can catch some more on this when my Metroid and Zelda impressions come out, but the basic idea is that you have to do really tiny movements to make the screen reflect what you want perfectly. For games with fixed cameras like Wii Sports’ tennis, it doesn’t matter since it doesn’t control the camera, but with Zelda and Metroid…boy is that tricky to aim and it could be a problem when the system is released. Now, it might be one of those things where you just have to play it enough to get used to it, but while I was having fun learning about the system and how it plays, I still couldn’t look past the fact that it didn’t control as well as I thought it would.

More Wii images