I had a chance to play a co-worker's Nintendo Wii after work this evening (if you're giggling, please leave now). It's the first time I've ever played with it, much less seen one in person. By all accounts, the Wii is still incredibly hard to find. One of my co-workers happened to get lucky one morning waiting for a Target store to open and was able to snag one from their limited shipment.
There were some problems getting the remotes to function properly at first, which I was told was very odd considering that no problems of that sort had been encountered for the past couple weeks. I seem to have this kind of effect on hardware of all sorts. Monitors wear out prematurely when it's my desk they call home. Removable DVD drives refuse to be recognized when notebooks are booted up in my docking station. Devices that work flawlessly 99.9% of the time refuse to function as intended in my presence.
It's a gift; what else can I say?
Batteries were checked in both remotes and even replaced. The remotes were reconnected to the console multiple times. Connections coming out of the Wii were double-checked. Sensors were wiped clean of dust. Finally, the sensor bar was relocated from the top of the television to the bottom, which seemed to be the trick of the hour. The remotes were behaving and my first gaming experience with the Wii was able to proceed.
Since my time with it was limited, I only played Wii Sports. Seeing as how it comes bundled with the console, it's a great way to introduce new owners to their Wii, why it's different, and how it's played. Kudos to Nintendo for being the only one of the big 3 to include a game with their console - even if it's more tutorial than a full-blown AAA title. You can play baseball, tennis, bowling, boxing, and golf. I was able to play all of them except for golf.
Being the baseball freak that I am, we started there. You can just flick your wrist to throw the ball or go through the regular baseball throwing motion. The faster the wrist flick, the faster the ball is thrown. I thought this added a nice bit of variety and depth to a simple game - through this technique, fastballs ranged from 65mph up to the high 90's. Holding down the A, B, or both buttons while throwing resulted in throwing a curveball, screwball, or splitter. The control pad is used to change pitch location.
The batter simply had to swing the remote at the appropriate time to hit the pitch. That's all the players do - pitch and swing. Traditional fielding of the ball is not done. Ground balls fielded in front of outfielders or balls bouncing off the gloves of infielders results in a single. Balls that get over or past the outfielders are doubles. My co-worker had yet to see what it took to get a triple, although we guessed a ball off the wall might get it done. A home run is, of course, self-explanatory. Runners on base move the same number of bases as the batter on a hit. There are no double plays.
The one game we played was 3 innings. I ended up winning 3-0 as I was able to string together a few doubles in the 2nd inning. The game was definitely simple, but also satisfying and fun to play. Being a fan the pleasure derived from playing a game offering a cooperative mode, I found that Wii Sports does a great job of satisfying gamers in the same way.
Next on the list was bowling. Here's a good example of how it's played. You "bowl" the ball using the remote. You can control where on the line your Mii stands as well as adjust their rotation. How hard you throw controls the speed of the ball as well. I got the hang of it after a few frames, but we stopped after about 4 frames to move on to something else. It wasn't anything spectacular for me and didn't have the same competitive fun factor as the other games we played.
We then moved on to tennis, which plays as you might expect it to after reading how the baseball game played. It was a doubles game where you don't control the Mii's movements; you only tell them when to swing. Being a timing based exercise once again, you could control the location of the ball by varying when you swing at it.
We played probably a half dozen matches of tennis. Despite not winning any of them, I still enjoyed playing this one as well.
We wrapped it up with boxing, which I was also terrible at. I couldn't seem to get the hang of it. I would assume my timing was simply off as I wasn't able to string any combos together (intentionally) and was repeatedly on the receiving end of such combos that drained about half of my energy. For me at least, this one would take a bit more practice to get the hang of.
All in all, it was a good time. It was enjoyable, I worked up a light sweat (although I was overdressed for today's temperature), and it was fun playing with another human being in something that didn't involve shooting one another. I look forward to trying out a few more games on the Wii and forming a more complete opinion.