neurological dryer lint

so here's some quick first impressions of the wii and some games:

- setup was a breeze. throw the sensor bar on your TV and you're in business - very simple. on first boot i pointed it at my WPA2 wireless network and it jumped on the net and promptly grabbed two OS updates which took about 5 minutes total to grab and install.

- the OS is much snappier than on the demo unit i used. way to address that complaint quickly. renee and i created mii's - your avatar on the system - pretty quickly and easily. you can store a whole lot of them on your system, and they are transferrable via SD card to another wii.

- buying stuff from the virtual console store is easy. i grabbed zelda 1 already and fired it up. the whole experience was perfect.

- there's no clear indication on the unit of which way is up when you are putting disks into the drive. standing upright, the top of a disc goes to the right, FYI.

- still no mp3 player. bah.

- the news/weather channels don't work yet. you can't buy the web browser yet. nothing that i'm going to cry about, but it makes the whole think look rather unfinished out of the box.

- wii sports is excellent. renee and i played everything except golf. critics have talked about how they aren't faithful representations of the game - but they're not meant to be simulators, just party games. tennis is probably the most fun, it plays like table tennis, and that's the first thing we did. i can't describe the thrill of raising my remote up and then swinging to serve it for the first time - it rules.

- baseball is basically home run derby. also fun, but it's tough to hit homers.

- bowling is also a lot of fun. it reads the tilt of your wrist as you 'roll' the ball and sends it down the lane accordingly. this one will probably be the one we play the most.

- boxing is a little random, pretty much you just swing your remote + nunchuck around (each one is a fist) and try to hit the other person and then try some semblance of blocking. Punch Out this ain't, but it's still kinda fun. note: this is the last of the four we played, and i didn't start sweating until then. sweet.

- red steel: from the 20 minutes i played, i was less than impressed. 'polished' is not a word you'd use to describe this game. running, ducking, and trying to shoot people from far away is fun, the storyline looks kind of interesting, but two elements made me groan right away: the graphics (which are less-than-gamecube-level, approaching N64-level), and they try to work this graphic novel-esque concept but it just ends up looking like a bad segaCD game; and the controls. everything is fine if you keep your remote pointed at the TV at all times. i think that's going to be one big learning curve for the system - remembering that the wiimote captures ALL of your input, including when you, say, scratch your head with your right hand, and on screen your player starts spinning around like crazy. and it's not like, you point back at the screen and everything goes normal - it takes a few seconds to reorient yourself and aim somewhere meaningful, and by then you've been shot a dozen times.

swordplay isn't too great, feels generic. the whole game has promise if i can get accustomed to how it controls... but it shows one serious hurdle for developers making games for the system: you have to get the controls right, because there's a very fine line between innovative and fun (wii sports) and frustrating (red steel).

i'm picking up zelda on the way home and i'm sure it will ease all my concerns.