So I've spent the past day playing the Wii, and so far I have not been wowed. To be completely honest, my experience has been mixed. For every good thing, there seems to be something bad balancing things.
1. The UI - Sure, the Channel setup is kinda neat, but the system setup, including the online setup is kinda cryptic in comparison to the 360 and PS3. Why do the News and Weather channels instruct me to DL an update, when they should say that those channels will be available in a future update? I feebly tried updating my system like 3 times trying to get them to work before I hopped online and found out the reality. There was similar confusion when signing up for the Wii store. ANd why won't it save my credit card information? That's just common sense. Similarly, why does each individual game get it's own Channel? That will make the channels screen unnecessarily bloated once you DL more than a few games. Why not a channel for each system? To its credit, once you fiddle with it for a while and have everything set up and going, the interface is a charm to navigate - the only sore points are the "each game gets a channel" thing, and the CC info thing.
2. The Virtual Console - I guess it's kind of unfair to pick on the lineup after its only been out for a week, but Nintendo got the launch all wrong. They should've launched with at least a couple dozen games. And why does it seem like a ton of the games they have picked for the VC have been anthologized recently? 8 bucks for Sonic? I can get Sonic Collection for 20 now. Anyway, Nintendo has priced themselves out of my game in this department, outdoing MS's 360 XBLA prices. Sony's price of 6 bucks per PS1 game also pantses Nintendo's lame effort. I do like the DL interface with Super Mario hitting the blocks; a pity SMB isn't available for FUCKING DOWNLOAD.
3. The waggle - Well, I guess this is the one that really matters, and Nintendo has failed to produce a game that could live up to any promises or fanboy dreams so far. The waggle works fine in Wii Sports, although only half the games in it are worth much interest. In Zelda, even though the waggle is only used for aiming and sword swinging, the waggle shows weakness. In aiming, the crosshair moves slowly, and if you move your wrist quickly, it seems a bit floaty or laggy. This pretty much defeats the point of precision aiming. Not to mention that you'd better hope when you raise your hand to aim that you are in the proper, kinda small invisible box in which the sensor bar will record your movements. It usually takes me about a second to get myself oriented, which again defeats the purpose of precision aiming. Sword swinging is just flat out dumb. There's no reason a sword swing that has no relevance to how you are moving should be relegated to waggle. Here the waggle is acting like a plain old digital button. It is pointless. When you are a wolf, you even more pointlessly waggle to attack. Even if you buy into the IMMERSION IMAGINATION of swinging the wiimote to swing the sword, it doesn't make sense in the context of a wolf biting.
Monkey Ball is a mixed bag as far as controls go. They are too touchy for precision in the main, classic Monkey Ball game, but the waggle works well in certain minigames, in particular the FPS one, whcih shows that there may be hope in the future for a Wii FPS. Also, the main, classic game is rather easy by Monkey Ball standards, but I guess that's a design decision based on how touch the controls were. Some of the minigames have absolutely ludicrous, arbitrary controls. If people want to argue that waggling makes games easier, I dare them to play the awful, convoluted alien shooting minigame. You look like you're conducting a fucking symphony, and you still can't control the damed thing with any precision or accuracy.
Zelda, as has been stated elsewhere, is no best of show, graphically. Monkey Ball looks rather nice, although much like Wind Waker, it uses a timeless art style that is not bounded by technical limitations. It's definitely too early to make calls on graphics since I have been told that most of the launch titles were basically developed on GC hardware. That in mind, Zelda is still disappointing looking for even a GC game.
In conclusion, although Sony had a more fucked up launch, their product doesn't at least seem like it's an experiment that can go either way at this point. That said, I am profoundly worried that Nintendo's questionable concepts will catch on, and Sony and MS will base their future products on waggle wishes. I am praying that this thing quietly falls out of the attention of anyone that is not a Nintendo fan once this initial wave of hype wears off.
