The days of wiine and roses

If any of you follow console gaming, you already know that Nintendo's Wii is currently the the console to beat. Innovative, simple controls and a fetching price-tag have made it surprisingly popular. Developers are scrambling to produce content for it after they abandoned Nintendo during the GameCube years. Nintendo themselves didn't anticipate its popularity enough and are having trouble keeping up the supply chain. Since the day it was launched, stores can't keep them on the shelves for more than a couple of hours. Many of the smaller gaming stores haven't even seen any in shipments for months.
That's because they're all hiding in Vancouver Washington. I have it on good authority that the Fred Meyer store in Vantucky there keeps a constant supply of Wiis. But, hey. Since it's not the day after Thanksgiving, no one really cares about How 'Drink got is Wii. I could have grabbed one before, lots of people did. Needless to say I have one now.

It is cool, innovative, and fun. I can play video games without the usual butt-cramping, and thumb-wear I'm used to for marathon sessions. Games are intuitive, and family-friendly. Inadvertently or not, Nintendo has re-awakened the parlor-game niche for the console market. You think anyone's going to shell out for a dumbed-down tennis/golf/bowling/pool game for their spanking-new now-gen state-of-the-art console? Not on your life. But wait, to play tennis I swing my little wii-mote like a real tennis racket? Sign me the fuck up! The possibilities for cheesy, simple games that use even a shred of real-life activity in the wii-mote are endless (although most possibilities are already covered in the WarrioWare game- trust me).

Getting the thing started was not all booze and daises, there's a couple of quirks I didn't expect that left a sort of tangy taste in my mouth from something that's supposed to be sexy and elegant from start to finish.

Sensor Bar: Once I decided where to put the sensor bar on the top of my not-flat-topped TV, I was cruising along just fine. Until I noticed some colored splotches marring the stark-white background of the Wii menus. I don't have a new TV, it's a couple of years old and shows a little bit magnet-wear, and don't commonly stare at a completely white background so at first I thought maybe my tube was just showing its age. The more I stared, the worse it got, and soon enough a casual flip of the channels was enough to confirm that something had affected the screen magnetically. Sure enough moving the bar away from the TV for more than a few seconds started the screen down its slightly less blotchy look. Swell. This of course prompted me to move the bar from one frying pan into another fire: on the TV stand, in reach of my toddler. Needless to say we can now play the Wii blemish-free, but occasionally have to pry the sensor bar away from the little bandit before he rips the cord out during his getaway run. Silly Nintendo, if the thing was meant to be put on top of or as close to a TV as possible wouldn't some better video shielding been in order? Or have we simply crossed over the event-horizon of old cathode tubes, while I'm still spinning in an ever-smaller orbit on my 3-year-old, not LCD, non HD junker?

WiFi: One of the coolest features of the Nineteno Wii is the built in WiFi access. No extra network adapters to buy, just plug and play. Sort of. Setting it up was easy, I keep my wireless wide open these days (drop me a line, I'll give you my address and you can sit out front of my house and hog my bandwidth all day if you want) so I didn't even have to deal with any WEP or WPA hoopla. Click the button.. searching...searching.. squat. I scratch my head and take another look through the settings: all of which are correct (hi.. part-geek for a living, I know how to configure wireless junk). Nothing. Now I'm grumpy because I have to get off my lazy couch and dive into my wireless router to see what's up. Big surprise, everything is fine. Other computers are connected, the Wii just doesn't even show up on the list. Start to wonder is the Wii 802.11b or g? I have my router set to deliver g-only, since none of my devices are Neanderthal enough to only have b capabilities. 'Cept for my Wii apparently. Switching up my signal to broadcast both b and g ranges got the Wii happily on its way and (slowly) downloading updates. Maybe it was a cost-cutting decision, the Wii packs in a lot of mojo for a small price-tag. Perhaps it was a reliability and range issue. I was just a little disappointed inside to take what I felt was a step backward in my digital life.

That's it, that's all. Just two little issues in an otherwise worthy device. Maybe it's just me: my TV is too old, my router is too new for the Wii (hint, the TV and router are the same age = 3 years older than the Wii).

Oh and watch out for the tennis game, it's a doosey on the medical bills.