Giiviing iin

As things go, I was a pretty good hold out but after sufficient quantities of pleading our new Wii arrived and has been installed with our new television set. (That's a long story too, mostly related to the picture tube dying on our old set.) So without further ado, here are the lessons I have learned to date.

Buy extra wiimotes. Get at least 1 and preferably 3 extra wiimotes, at least one of which packaged with WiiPlay. The wii works best when it's a social activity and 2 (and preferably 4) wiimotes allows you to play many of the multiplayer games. This extra purchase will set you back approximately $130+ but seems an essential part of the system. If you have the $$s, an extra nunchuck will assist for some games.

Appreciate the packaged software. After a disastrous encounter with a Monkey Ball game, I've learned that software written specifically for the wii that understands the wii and the wiimote beats any software that was adapted. The knitted Cow racing game (yes, you read that right) in WiiPlay was far superior to any of the third party offerings. In fact, the Sports package that Nintendo bundles with the system is probably good for weeks of play without any further purchases. I'm told that I should keep an eye out for the following packages when I'm ready to pawn my eldest child for additional software: Wario Smooth Moves, Rayman Raving Rabbids, and Excite Truck.

It's not a Mac. I'm not saying that I'm an elitist Applecentric snob, no wait, yes, i am. And a lot of the UI decisions made me roll my eyes. The five screens before you can play any game, the mismatched dialog boxes without consistent font usage, the fact that you must pay 5 bucks for a Web browser, the fact that there doesn't seem to be easy third party development for an Internet-savvy device. Yes, there are things I love (the buzz feedback when you select buttons, for example) but I want to set a few Apple quality engineers on Nintendo and give them free reign for a few weeks.