I got my Wii and it kicks ass. The Wiimote is great and Wii Sports is addictively fun.

I actually waited in line at the local Toys R Us on the night before the Wii was be released. I NEVER do that sort of thing. I couldn’t sleep that night due to some lingering jetlag from going to Taipei and Singapore for Adobe Max so I thought I would put my insomnia to good use. To cut what could be a long story a little shorter, many hours passed and finally a clerk from the store came out to pass out tickets. I was #22 in a line of about 70 or so people.

THEY ONLY HAD 21!! *sigh*

Once regaining perspective and feeling in my now very cold toes, I headed home a bit disappointed.
The next day on eBay to discover 16,000 Wiis in auction with about 10 auctions closing each minute. There were so many that even snipers couldn’t go at all of them. I ended up getting a Wii for a decent deal considering there were pretty much no other bidders on that particular auction.

I got the Wii yesterday and am very happy with it. For a first generation of a completely different control scheme it is excellent. As always, Nintendo did their research and really made a solid product.

If you have a Wii, add me as a friend! Have your Wii send me an email or use my Wii console number:

1046 6605 9241 4673

The big highlights for me:

1. The acceptable angle is great. I can be at a really flat angle to the sensor bar and it still works well
2. Nintendo is pretty much the first console to use some more standards-based features like bluetooth for the wireless controllers (dunno about the 360 controllers). But even more impressive is that the memory is in the form of SD cards rather than proprietary memory.
3. I was surprised that I could still plug in my game cube controllers. I thought I was going to have to buy the classic controller for that.
4. The Mii. Rather than having some annoying account system on the box, it was made much more fun by having Miis. Miis are avatars that are surprisingly configurable. once you have your Mii(s) set up, they can be used to store settings or profile information in games. The game developers even have access to them. All of the Wii Sports games star you! Actually, the funniest was when some friends were over playing bowling I noticed that Ray’s and my Miis were sitting on the bench, hanging out with our friends in the game.
5. Miis deserve a second slot. You can even load the Miis into your Wiimote and take them with you to play on other systems. I wish I could do that with profile configurations for playing Halo on the 360.
6. power button on the Wiimote can also but the console into standby and wake it back up. You never need to touch the console except to swap discs.

The biggest disappointments are:

1. Only shipping with one Wiimote (controller). With the run on ALL accessories, it kinda sucks to only have one controller for what should be a party game system.
2. Having a big brick of a power adapter that only works on 120V input. I had been planning to bring it with me to Flash on the beach, but alas. (and I am not risking a power converter with my precious).
3. You can’t connect other bluetooth devices to the Wii as far as I can tell. It would have been nice to move images there through bluetooth rather than through SD (though that is still cool)
4. Wii Channels. Right now a lot of the information channels seem to be disabled (waiting for service to start). Also, the shopping channel has a pretty small selection to start with of the legacy games. I thought they were going to have pretty much the whole old software library. I would have liked it for the obscure games I could never find growing up. Plus $8 to re-play a game I probably bought for $15 to begin with seems a bit pricey, though I suppose in-line with mobile games.

For any wondering, Ray says I still throw like a girl even when it is virtual. Ah well, some things may even be too much for Nintendo to take care of.