Famous Mii Website

One of the cute things about the Nintendo Wii is that you can design a "Mii", a simple character that can then be used in other Mii-capable games such as Wii Sports. This of course leads to attempts to build Mii celebrities. Within a couple of days of registering your Wii with friends, you're likely to get a Mii Shaq O'Neill and a Mii Jesus plop into your Mii household, and after that you'll see a few celebrities show up in your Mii parades.

Enter Famous Mii.com. This site has some step-by-step instructions on how to make famous Mii's! The nice thing about this site is that most of the Mii's actually do look like the celebrities they claim to be.

If you've got a Wii, enjoy!

Christmas Winners Honorable Mention

With the horrid Strawberry Shortcrap Karaoke Set now safely back at Toys 'R' Us, our attention the last couple of days has turned to some of the better presents. My son and I have spent quite a bit of time building the the Mega Bloks Battlestorm Castle the past few days, and each time I sit down with it, I am more and more impressed. This is an excellent product.

First, you get a ton of quality building time for your money. There are more than 400 pieces in this set, and about 60 detailed steps to putting them all together. I'm working slowly with my son and trying to let him do as much as possible. He is a full year younger than the minimum recommended age of 6+, so things are slow going. We'll do a half hour a couple of times a day. I'd say we are now about two-thirds of the way complete, with about 2-3 hours total time spent so far. But this is a wonderful parent-child project, and we're having a great time.

Second, everything fits together well. With this many parts, all it would take is for some shoddy manufacturing to make the assembly a nightmare. But it's not. Everything is there, and everything snaps together cleanly and well. Some of the elements come apart again a bit easier than I would like, so we've had some minor rebuilding to do after a random five-year-old arm sweep bashed off the top of the adjoining tower, but for the most part, they seem to have gotten the "difficulty-to-assemble/easy-of-disassembly" balance pretty much on the spot.

Third, if you like manuals, this set has the second best manual I have ever seen. Heck, if you like manuals, this might be a good purchase for the manual alone. It's a full-color, high-quality book on large paper, and it goes on for page after page. And get this: there are no words! Everything is done with pictures, arrows, and a few numbers, and it's crystal clear what you have to do. The attention to detail is outstanding. At the end, there are even full-page, full color pictures of alternate builds you can make with the castle. The person who created this manual should get a Noble Prize.

Lastly, and most important, there is a ton of fun stuff in this box. In addition to the castle, you get one larger dragon, two smaller ones, six knights (albiet small ones), a catapult, a javelin thrower, a working drawbridge, a spiked log trap, and functional moat with a real waterfall! Ok, ok, I'm just kidding about the moat and waterfall. But usually when you buy a set like this, they show you a picture on the front of the box with a ton of awesome stuff on it, and then hidden somewhere on the back, in teeeny weeny letters, is that 75% of the stuff is sold separately. So to get everything you see, your approximate cost would be about the same as a year of college tuition at a prestigious Ivy League college. But with this castle, all the cool stuff is there! Amazing!

Highly recommended at this point!

Strawberry Shortcrap Karaoke Set, Part II!

Yesterday, I talked about our household's 2006 Christmas Crap Award Winner, the Strawberry Shortcake Karaoke Set.

But little did I know that the story would get better. Astute readers will remember that I complained about the lack of a power switch for the product, which has a power light that stays on all the time, thereby draining batteries at a remarkable rate.

Well, I was wrong. There is a power switch. But you'll never guess where! I had some time this morning to return some Christmas presents, one of which was the Strawberry Shortcrap Karaoke Set. Before taking the thing back to Toys 'R' Us, I got out a screwdriver and opened up the battery case to take out our batteries. And there it was: the power switch! Whoever made this product brilliantly decided to put the switch underneath the battery cover! This might be fine if the battery cover was easily accessible, but it's not: you have to take out a long screw, which is set in a hole in the case so narrow that none of our normal screwdrivers could fit. What a great idea!

So let's sum up the defects with this wonderful children's product:

• The microphone wires have a carcinogenic coating.
• In some versions, the tapes contain sexual lyrics clearly unsuitable for young children. Keep in mind that the suggested age for this product is three-years-old and up. We actually never got to the lyrics issue, because of the next defect...
• In our special version, we couldn't play tapes because the machine kept eating them.
• The screw to the battery cover is set in a hole too narrow to reach with a normal screwdriver.
• The power switch is under the above difficult-to-remove battery cover.
• I forgot to mention this one yesterday, but there is no manual.

This is simply an amazing design accomplishment. I can see the marketing discussions now:
Lead Designer: Let's make a Karaoke set for little children!
Assistant Designer: Great idea! How about we put a cheap carcinogenic coating on the microphone wires?
Lead Designer: Humm, I'm not sure. Parents might not go for us killing their kids.
Assistant Designer: Oh, ok, perhaps we could distract them, then! We'll add a mini-game called "Find the Power Switch!" We can put the switch in a difficult to access place, then not include any manual in the box! Parents will be so busy trying to figure out how to turn the thing off that they'll never notice their kids' brain tumors!
Lead Designer: Brilliant! And we'll save money on the manual that way as well! I like it. Now, what about music?
Assistant Designer: Humm, sex sells, so how about provocative, suggestive music about fornication?
Lead Designer: Great point! That way parents can play with it after their kids go to sleep! It'll be an overnight sensation, this year's hot Christmas item! Oh, but wait, the religous right might get a bit ticked off.
Assistant Designer: Humm. Well, we could make the cassette player eat any tape you put into it! That way no one would ever hear the lyrics!
Lead Designer: Brilliant! Let's run with it. Get started right away.

Christmas Crap Award Winner!

There was some tough competition this year, with contenders including a Mega Blocks monster thingie whose head falls off and a doll house with flimsy cardboard walls that knock down all the furniture inside when you touch any part of the house. The hands down winner, though, has to be the incredibly cute piece of carcinogenic crap called the Strawberry Shortcake Karaoke Set.

This was an impulse buy at Toys 'R Us, and it's likely the only present that we'll be returning. I should have read the Amazon reviews, which mention things like carcinogenic coatings on the parts and lyrics inappropriate for young kids. In our case, however, the lyrics complaint wouldn't have matteredd: we never heard the songs on the tape.

Every time we put a tape in the thing, it ate it. Three for three. Each of these incidents necessitated a ten-minute surgery to extricate the gnarled tape, during which time our daughter would suck on the carcinogenic microphone.

Even better, this battery powered product has no power switch, which means that the power light is always on, always draining the batteries. What a great design concept this is! The only way to turn it completely off is to remove the four C batteries with a screwdriver? Brilliant!

I'll let my daughter sum it up best:
"Let's do something else, Daddy."

Christmas Winners!

Here are this year’s early winners for best Christmas toys in our household, as chosen by our three-year-old daughter and our five-year-old son. Keep in mind that things change; kids are whimsical and things break.

Our three-year-old daughter has adamantly professed her love for her Princess Dining Set, consisting of a cup, plate, and bowl. This $10 gift has beaten out the $40 doll house, a $25 Finding Nemo Leapster game, and a $35 Hello Kitty Karaoke set. More on the Hello Kitty Karaoke set tomorrow, which will most likely win the Christmas Crappy Toy Award this year.

Our five-year-old son has voted for three consecutive days for his $25 Power Ranger Action Figure set (link unavailable). The Bandai figures are pretty good in terms of flexibility and durability, and this set comes with two small motorcycles and three figures. I’m not sure this one will last the week though, as we’ve been putting together his $50 Mega Block Castle, and his interest in that is climbing as we get more of it finished.

Rising in the rankings though is the surprising $10 Spider-Man Memory Match Up. We opened this one today and two hours later my five-year-old son was still playing with it. The game is a neat twist on the typical memory game: You’ve got 10 Marvel Super Heros that pull apart at the waist, leaving you with two halves for each of them. You then cover these 20 half bodies with 20 cups on a red playing case. From there, the game plays like any standard memory game. The pieces are cute, and super heros are always a huge hit in this age range.

The thing that I like about this game is that the box, which doubles as the playing board, is a sturdy plastic carrying case for the game pieces. Games that include good storage options score bonus points in my world.

There may be potential for creative play with this game as well. After we played the memory game, my son then played with them for another hour, creating such memorable games as “Bumper Car Cups”, in which the superheros rode around in the little cups and tried to knock the other ones out.

The game’s not perfect, though. A couple of the bottom halves are so similar (Spiderman and Spider Girl, for example) as to make it hard for a three-year-old to figure out which goes with which, and it’s a bit tricky to set the game up without catching glimpses of the pieces in the cups, but still, for $10, it’s been a serendipitous winner.

Up next: This Year’s Losers.

Nintendo Stock (NTDOY) Doubles in 2006; Up Over 10% Since Wii Release

Despite solid sales and review accolades, the Wii in its first month of release has had setbacks. News of TV screens shattering from flying Wiimotes has permeated the national media. At the core of the controversy is the small strand of string that joins the wrist strap to the Wiimote. When heavy friction and sweaty hands wear down the thin joining string, it can break. If you happen to have a loose grip on the Wiimote when this happens, you end up launching the controller in various and sometimes costly directions.

On December 6, 2006, Green Welling LLP of Seattle Washington filed a national class action law suit against Nintendo for a breach of warranty with regards to the wrist straps. Nintendo has subsequently recalled 4 million of the launch wrist straps, at what will be a cost of millions to the company. It will replace them with a strap that secures to the Wiimote with a strand of string that is nearly twice as thick as the original.

What has not made the national news with the same frequency, however, is the price of Nintendo's stock (NTDOY). As of this morning, nearly a month after release of the Wii, NTDOY was up more than 10% over its November 16 pre-release price. Fueled by the popularity of both the DS and Wii, the stock has essentially ignored the strap recall and lawsuit. The 10% rise is in addition to a run up of the stock's price in the months before the release. If the current price of nearly $31 per share holds over the last few days of December, Nintendo's stock will have doubled in 2006. Nice returns for a company who future looked bleak a few years ago.

Go Away Monster!

I started looking for games for our two kids when they were very young, but quickly ran into a problem: most games are designed for five-year-olds and up. It was downright challenging finding a game for a three-year-old and a one-year-old that was any good.

Enter “Go Away Monster.” We got this game for my daughter for her second birthday, and it became an immediate hit in our family, despite its simplicity.

The game consists of four small fold-out boards of bedrooms and one bag with a bunch of cardboard pieces for furniture and monsters in it. To play, each player gets one of the bedroom boards at the start of the game. The goal is to complete your bedroom by getting one each of the four missing items: a lamp, a bed, a picture, and a teddy bear.

Play goes in turns, with each player reaching into the bag and pulling out a game piece. Each type of piece is a different size and shape, and players can’t look into the bad while picking, so gameplay facilitates some sensory skill building. If the piece is a piece of furniture and the player can use it, the player adds it to her bedroom. If the piece is a monster, the player tosses it into the gamebox (or somewhere else, if you like) and says “Go Away Monster!” To encourage cooperative play, if the player picks a piece of furniture that she already has, she can give it to another player that needs it. The first player to finish her bedroom is the winner.

You can play a game with four people in about ten minutes, depending on the mood and concentration level of your kids. Two-player games are even faster.

All in all, I’d have to say this is one of the better purchases we've made for our kids when they were very young.

Available at Funagain Games and BoardGameGeek.

Enjoy!

Wii Tennis Two-Player Impressions

Work has been brutally busy and family commitments have been eating up the rest of the time, so there hasn't been much time for the fun stuff that I'm hoping to concentrate on in this blog.

However, there is one thing to mention: a second Wiimote for our Wii. I lucked out on finding one at a Gamestop the other day.

All I've had time to try is some two-player tennis with my five-year old son, but it was a roaring good time. We played cooperatively, winning three games and losing three games.

The thing that really strikes me whenever we use the Wii is how much we laugh and smile. Whether it's watching or playing, everyone in the room has a good time, and it's just plain fun. I like our PS2 and our Xbox, but this sort of infectious enjoyment doesn't happen on those systems to anywhere the same degree.

Nintendo Wii Wiimote Replacement Straps

Nintendo has created a new strap for their Wiimotes that is stronger than the original one. If you have a Wiimote with one of the orginal straps, Nintendo is offering to replace it for free.

Fill out the form here. You'll need your Wii's serial number, which you can find on the back of the console itself.

Here is a larger version of the photo to the right. It shows the difference between the two straps more clearly.

This is good news for all of you who like your televisions, but it's yet another setback in my attempt to get my wife to approve a new HDTV purchase.

Despair.com

Tired of sappy motivational posters or just looking for some last minute holiday shopping ideas? Check out Despair.com. They make some classy parodies of traditional inspirational posters. You can get these sayings in a variety of formats: make-it-yourself calendars, posters, and mugs, for example. In the past, I always felt their stuff was pricey, but looking over their prices today, it seems that they’ve gotten more reasonable.

Here is a great page that makes it easy to browse all their photos and sayings. A couple of my favorites are below. Enjoy!

Matrix Games Sale

Matrix Games is a small publisher that has a nice collection of excellent games, with a strong slant towards wargames. They are currently running a holiday sale with 25% off selected games. This is a good chance to grab the digital download versions of some of their expensive, high-end titles for a more reasonable price.

Of particular note are the digital versions of Battles in Italy ($37.49), Battles in Normandy ($37.49), Across the Dnepr ($11.24), and PureSim Baseball ($22.49). Battles in Italy and Battles in Normandy are usually $50 each for the digital downloads alone. It’s rare to be able to snag them for under $40.

The 25% off sale on the CD versions of the Matrix games is not such a big deal, however. The regular prices of these games at the reliable NWS Online Combat Gaming Store are close to or even cheaper than the sale prices at Matrix.

And in all cases, stay far far away from Maximum Football. You’ve been warned.

The sale runs until January 6, 2007.

Wii Sports Impressions: Wii Golf

Of the five Wii Sports, I’ve spent the least time with golf. This doesn’t mean that the game is bad, per se, but just that the others have been a lot more fun to play. One thing working against golf is its sterile environment. In the other four sports, there are a lot of Miis around while you play. In golf, you’re out on the course by yourself. It’s a small thing, for sure, but it does make the golf game more barren than the other games.

Also, the options in golf are incredibly limited. You’ve only got one 9-hole course, and with only four clubs to choose from, the game seems is simple to the core.

I can say that the club controls feel about right. I’m a little less sure of the physics model; watching some of my wife’s shots make me think the ball should behave differently than it does.

I’m hoping to become a pro at all the Wii Sports, however, so at some point I hope to come back to this game and play it a bit more.

Wii Tennis, from Noob to Pro in One Hour

What a dope. I was struggling mightily in Wii Tennis the 15 or so sets I had played with the game. I was winning as much as I was losing, and making little progress towards my 1,000 points needed to become a Pro. In short, I sucked.

Tonight, I saw the light. Or lights, as the case may be.

The first light went off at the game setup screen. When Wii Tennis loads, the game shows two of your Miis, one near the net and one in the back court. Somewhat naturally, I assumed that the gamer has to select where he wants his or her Mii to play. Thinking this way, I’d click on one of my Miis to remove it from the game, leaving only one Mii of me in the game. The console would then control both my opponents, as well as my partner. When you do this, though, Wii Sports gives you the lamest partner it can find: most of my partners have had less than 50 skill points. They suck worse than I do.

Tonight I realized you can leave both of your Miis in the game! Aha! Now you’ve got a partner with at least a few hundred skill points, which is much better than the dopey players the game gives you if you remove your other self from the game.

The second light went off when I realized that if I leave both of my Miis in the game, I can control both of them with my one controller! D’oh! This makes it so much easier to play, as the AI would rarely have my partner do anything useful, like hit the ball.

The third light went off when I finally realized how to hit the ball with force and accuracy. One of the big keys is to make much smaller, faster movements. For the first few hours I had played, I’d been flailing around like Conan the Barbarian. By the end of my session tonight, I was just making quick flicking movements that were driving the ball with authority. Very cool.

The result: I rocketed from 300 points to 1100 points in less than one hour. Pro Level at Tennis! Woot!

My Evil Wiimote Plan

I want a new HDTV to replace the twelve-year-old CRT beast we currently have. Getting this purchase past the home finance committee (my wife) has been surprisingly tough. Usually these things go through committee easily, but she's holding the TV hostage until we get a new house. Which could take a while, so we need a new approach.

Inspired by those of you who have launched your Wiimotes through your TVs, I now have a plan. A devious, evil plan. It's called "Encouraging my five-year-old son to play Wii Tennis without the safety strap on when the wife isn't around." I figure one slip of his wrist and we can kiss our current TV goodbye. One that is out of the way, it only makes sense to buy a new HDTV.

I realize this is risky. He could just as easily propel the Wiimote through the bay window and onto our front lawn. Or bounce the thing off my skull. But great achievement is not without great risk, and a Super Bowl in 50" Panasonic HDTV splendor tempts me too strongly.

But so far it's not working. He refuses to do it. Why a kid who would prefer to ride on the roof of our car instead of buckling up in his carseat is so steadfast in his refusal to play Wii Tennis without the strap on is beyond me, but so far I have had zero success. "No, Daddy, you have to use the strap!" Argh. Whose kid are you?

I think I'll need a Plan B. Maybe I can encourage him hold the Wiimote gently and swing harder? He did lose his grip on the Wiimote a week or so ago, but the safety strap held as intended. Intended by Nintendo, that is, not me.

In the mean time, my dusty, fat-ass, old Mitsubishi TV is still sitting there, mocking me with its durability and bright picture. I'll get you yet. There must be a way.

Knytt: Save the Alien!

Free is good. Games are good. Free games should be a no brainer then, but you often get what you pay for with regards to shareware and freeware. Knytt, however, is an awesome exception to the rule. It provides some outstanding free gaming goodness.

In this Windows game, you are a tiny, cute alien who has had a turn for the worse. Abducted by a UFO, you then crash on a foreign planet. To get off the planet, you run around hunting down parts for the UFO.

The platform gameplay is simple yet challenging. You've got some thinking to do to find the parts, and some nimble jumping to do to get to them. Most of the time, you can make things a lot easier on yourself by thinking your way past obstacles. Graphics are clean and neat, and the code appears to be rock solid: I've yet to encounter a crash in two hours of play.

To read more and download the game, go to the developer's website: Knytt

Wii Boxing Impressions

Of the five sports, boxing has been the biggest surprise. I really like this game. There is a lot of motion in the game, between jabbing and dodging and blocking, you've always got your hands and upper torso moving. After a couple of matches, I can tell that I've used my body. I wouldn't put it in the level of heavy exercise, but it definitely gets your heart going. I suppose when I get more comfortable with the controls, I'll be able to use less energy to play, but for now, it's a great way to get some light exercise at home in short intervals.

Each match is a simple, 3-round contest against a random opponent. As you earn status points, your opponents increase in difficulty. I’m currently in the 600-point range, but my improvement has leveled off. I’m now losing about as many matches as I win.

For the most part, the controls in boxing seem good, but there are times when I feel like my boxer isn’t responding to how I move the controls. There are other times when the controls seem too sensitive: a small twitch results in a big hit. Still, this is more likely to be my fault than the controls fault, and I am getting better with each match.

Boxing is clearly the most strenuous of the five games. The second night we had our Wii, I boxed for about an hour. The next day my arms were aching from all the motion. This is both a plus (good exercise) and a minus (can’t play for a long time).

Wii Baseball Impressions

Wii Baseball is another game with much of the sport removed. There are only two teams, yours and your opponent’s. All you do is hit and pitch. Games are three innings long, and all baserunning and fielding is handled automatically. It is fun to play, but at times the results feel kind of random.

While pitching, you can choose a bunch of different pitches: fastball, curve, splitter, and screwball. You can also choose the location of the pitch. Changing locations, speeds, and pitches seems to increase your odds of getting an out. While batting, you’ll hit the ball somewhere as long as you swing at the right time, but I don’t see a correlation between swing location and pitch location, and the results of hitting seemed quite random. Bat speed clearly matters, however. Swing fast and time it right and you’ll hit it hard somewhere.

Baseball, like tennis, is one of the games where I haven’t quite clued in to the control nuances of the game yet. One game I can throw 94mph fastballs at will; the next game I’m in the 65mph range. One game I’ll rack up five strikeouts in three innings, the next game the first five batters will get on base. I feel like I’m doing the same thing in each game, but for some reason my performance is spotty. Batting feels more accurate but is fairly arcade-like.

I’ve also found baseball to be a tough game. I’m currently in the 400-point range, and my opponents are quite tough. I lost my last game 7-4, and struggled mightily to get any sort of rally going. I can only imagine what’s going to happen when I get up in the 800-point range, if I make it that far.

Wii Tennis Impressions

Tennis is a perfect example of the simple nature of the Wii Sports games. Play is doubles only, and you don’t even directly control the movement of your player. The game does that for you. All you have to concern yourself with is hitting the ball. The control in tennis is good, but I have yet to consistently get power on the ball, and at times the angle of the ball off the racket seems a bit off. As a result, I’m not doing well at tennis. I’ve only amassed about 300 points towards my pro level, and am winning about half the time. Still, the game is entertaining enough that I keep coming back to it.

Up next, Wii Baseball!

Wii Bowling Impressions

Bowling was the first game we tried as a family, and it’s the one I’ve gone back to the most of the five games in the set. The controls in the game feel just about perfect: you can put spin on the ball by twisting your wrist as you throw, and the amount of spin varies nicely with how much you twist your wrist when you throw. The physics of the pin and ball collisions feel good, and the game is just plain fun. The nice thing about the bowling game is that you can bowl a string in about five minutes, so this makes it perfect for short breaks. The game keeps track of your high score as well. In the 20 or so strings that I have bowled, I have yet to break 200. My high is a 196, so the difficulty has been satisfying for me. I am closing in on pro status, as I only need another 50 or so points to reach the Promised Land.

Wii Sports: Solo-Play Impressions

Overall, I’ve been impressed by how much game time our family has put in with Wii Sports. We play on almost a daily basis for a half hour or so before the kids go to bed. However, both my wife and I will regularly sneak in some solo play after the kids go to sleep. I have been having a blast playing the games alone.

The Wiimote controller completely revolutionizes the gameplay. The difficulty of the games feels about perfect for me. If anything I’m wishing some of the sports were a bit easier.

As was mentioned in the family review, each of the five games in the Wii Sports pack is a simple, barebones game. However, there is one game feature that does add some complexity to the set. Each time you put in a good performance in Wii Sports you earn points in that particular sport. Once you accumulate 1,000 points in a sport, you are dubbed a “pro” at that sport. Weak performances lose you points, so weak performances can lose you that pro status. This is a simple feature, but it does increase the motivation to keep playing some of the games. It also is a good way to set the difficulty of the AI opposition to the skill of the gamer: as you accumulate points in a given sport, your opponents get tougher, and the quality of your performance needs to rise in order to be able to keep garnering points.

Next, I’ll take a look at each of the games in turn. Up first, Wii Bowling!

Wii Sports Impressions: A Family Perspective

Wii Sports is the disk of five simple sports games that comes with a Wii console: baseball, tennis, golf, boxing, and bowling. At this point, our family has played for about six hours over the past four nights. We haven’t been able to hunt down another controller, so all of these impressions are based on single-player mode.

If anything highlights the Wii’s potential, it’s that the bare bones games of Wii Sports bring such incredible entertainment value. Superficially, these five games are laughably simple. There is no fielding in baseball, for example. Tennis is doubles only. The only nod to a career mode in the games is that you gain points with good performances, and if you reach 1,000 in a given sport, you earn “pro” status. Feature-wise, these games are almost throwbacks to late 1980’s gaming. These same five games, ported to the Xbox or PS3, would be painfully boring and receive abysmal reviews. With the Wii’s controller, however, it’s a whole new game, and each of these games brings hours of fun and laughs.

From a marketing perspective, including Wii Sports with the system is a brilliant move on Nintendo’s part. For parties and family events the game is a hoot. It will earn Nintendo more revenue from increased Wii system sales than the game’s development could ever have cost.

The Wii Sports love fest runs across our whole family. My wife, who was fairly skeptical about getting a Wii and has probably played an hour’s worth of games in the past five years, is now fully on board after watching our five-year-old son play tennis the past two nights. He throws the ball up, runs around, swings the racket, makes grunting noises, and laughs the whole time. Living in a cold climate, it can be hard to wear him out in the winter, and according to my wife, he was completely exhausted from playing tennis for a half hour last night. And he had a ball doing it.

My wife as well is having a grand time with the various games. She doesn’t play long, but she plays and plays on her own, to boot. She has had a lot of fun with bowling, tennis, and golf. As we were bowling the other night, she casually mentioned that we should take the Wii with us to an upcoming evening at another couple’s house. “It’d make for a great evening,” she added. One week ago, if someone told me in a week’s time my wife would tell me we should bring a gaming system over to a friend’s house, I would have countered with something like, “Yeah, and this year the Cubs are going to win the World Series.” But the Wii does that to you. It is so infectiously fun, that you just can’t help it. It’s entertaining, it’s social, it’s intuitive, and it’s challenging.

The only one that is luke warm on the system is our three-year-old daughter. She doesn’t quite get the concept of some of the games yet. She has trouble waiting for the ball in tennis and handling the b-button press and release in bowling. She doesn’t seem that interested in baseball. Much to our concern, however, she greatly enjoys the boxing. She flails away with her arms, smiling and swinging as she pummels yet another hapless victim to the tarp. She is now an undefeated 3-0 after tonight’s 2-1 decision victory.

All in all, from a family perspective, the Wii and Wii Sports have been a tremendous hit, and by themselves validate the $250 purchase. I can see us getting together and having fun with this for quite a while. And I think things will ramp up another level when we can find another controller for two-player action.

Up next: individual impressions on each of the five Wii Sports games.

Elf Yourself!

Friday afternoons are made for frivolous internet searching. Today, I stumbled onto Elf Yourself, a free site that allows you to stick a head from any photo onto a dancing elf. Perfect for loved ones, bosses, or other creatures you wish to gently poke fun of. Check it out for some quick laughs.

Wii Impressions

Got our Wii delivered yesterday afternoon! I was able to play with my five-year-old son, three-year-old daughter, and wife for a couple of hours the past two nights. Also have put in about four hours on my own as well. Outside of making our Miis, we have exclusively played Wii Sports. I haven't even opened Zelda yet. We only have one Wiimote and Nunchuck, so these impressions are based on single-player play.

If you're short on time, this is a one-sentence summary: Wii gameplay is incredibly impressive.

If you have more time, here are some more details:
It's impossible to watch someone play a game with the Wiimote and not want to try. The system is as intuitive as it was made out to be. At one point, when I was loading the tennis game, my wife walked into the living room. I asked her if she wanted to try, she looked at the tv and immediately said yes. I gave her the Wiimote, and she asked me how to play the game.

I paused. This was a classic exchange that we had repeated a couple of dozen times over our five years of marriage, and with rare exception, the ending was bad.

With XBox or PS2 games, I'd explain how to play: "Push the B button to go faster. The A button is your brake. Change gears using the button by your right index finger. You turn using the pad on the left." By that point, her interest in the game in question was starting to wane already. She didn't want to "learn how to play", she just wanted to "play". Invariably, I'd forget to tell her a few things, and then I'd barrage her with more instructions in the first minute of play. After about two or three minutes, she'd hand the controller back to me. "Done." That was it. I'd lost her. Or rather, the interface had lost her.

But with the Wii, this was the extent of our conversation:

Wife: How do I play?
Me: Hit the ball.
Wife: (holds up Wiimote) With this?
Me: Yup.

Done. She was off and running, and had a blast. Lost two games, then won two games, smiling and swinging away the whole time.

Graphically, it's better than I expected it to be. We're playing on an older 36" tube tv hooked up via the composite cables that came with the Wii, and the graphics are clean and functional. It's not high-end beautiful, but the games are visually appealing and clear. Much more playable than I had thought it would be.

I'll post impressions of Wii Sports in a day or so.

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With Subtle Fun, I comment on less mainstream forms of enjoyment and entertainment in the gaming industry. On occasion, I wander into the more heavily trodden paths of gaming in general.

Like most bloggers, I reserve the prerogative to ingore this mission statement and comment freely on unrelated matters that I know nothing about.