This past weekend, I was talking about video games with some old friends at a wedding and someone asked me how long it took before I quit playing my Nintendo Wii. I laughed at first, then I truthfully answered ‘three months'. It's true. This thing gets old fast.
Late last year, a couple of days after Christmas, I finally fell for the hype and bought a Wii. I already have a Sony PlayStation 3 and enjoy it quite a bit, but I had become interested in the Wii since so many people I knew had them. My wife had been hunting them for a while and actually found two, so we bought one for us and another for a friend who wanted one for her kids.
At first, the Wii was awesome. I fired up Wii Sports, which is the game that comes free with the system, and pretty soon I was playing tennis and baseball and even bowling. I knew then that by ‘playing' it was just a series of short movements using the Wii's motion-sensitive controls, but it was still pretty fun. I then bought a few games, including a couple of those collections of mini-games and found them to be rather simple, too.
The biggest problem I've run into since buying the Wii is the selection of games available for it. There are far too many ‘collections' of mini-games packaged as one title, and so many of those mini-games are so simple that they aren't even worth playing. They use very basic gameplay mechanics combined with simplified motion controls for something a small child could figure out. Maybe that's my whole problem - too many of the games seemed like they were meant for kids.
As for the other games I've played, some of them have been fun. Super Mario Galaxy and Mario Kart are pretty sweet, but they are also flagship products of the Nintendo game line. Many of the crappy collection type games are made by third parties. The Mario games cost 50 bucks and the junk ones are 20 bucks. I wonder how many people end up (like me) with a bunch of crappy games just because the price is cheaper. It reminds me of the old Atari 2600 days when third party companies were churning out junk titles.
One of the big sellers for this console is the Wii Fit, which is an exercise ‘game' that comes with a balance board. Yeah, it is kind of cool and will give you a decent workout, but once you learn the exercises you can do the same thing without the board. Basically, it's just vertical Pilates and a bunch of stretching exercises. There are a few other games out there that also use the balance board. Even so, I think you'd get more health benefits out of putting your $100 toward a decent treadmill.
You can also go online via the Wii and pay to download some classic NES and SNES titles, but then you really need to get another controller ($20) to play them properly. These games range in price from 5-10 bucks, which is fairly reasonable if you really liked those old games. There are Wii games also available for download, but I've looked through the catalogue several times and never really saw anything worth buying.
After sorting through the game titles for the Wii, I've come to the conclusion that most of the games made for this system were meant to appeal to casual gamers who might only play the thing for brief periods at a time. Sure, you will get some exercise out of some of the games, and that's always a good thing. I just felt like the appeal didn't hold up well over time.
The $249 price tag of the Wii makes it seem affordable, but by the time you spend the money on accessories for this thing, you might as well get a PS3. First, it only comes with one controller and one nunchuk, which connect together to make one two-handed controller. If you want to play against someone else, you'll need another set. That's fifty to sixty bucks. If you play the Wii a lot, you'll need to buy either a rechargeable docking station or a bunch of batteries. That's another 20 or so bucks.
Then there's the whole graphics thing. This thing has graphics like a PlayStation 2. That might not have been such a bad thing...five years ago. It comes with a basic set of RCA cables that gives you a 480i resolution, and it looks like crap on my 47" Philips HDTV. I shelled out the cash (10 bucks) for a set of component cables in order to get 480p, which is the very best it will do, and that helped to sharpen things up a bit. Even so, every game on this looks like it was made during Bush's first term. Every time I play my PS3 with its high definition 1080p graphics, it makes looking at the Wii that much harder.
So how much did the Wii video game system really cost me? Here's the numbers:
Nintendo Wii - $250 Extra Controller and Nunchuk - $60 Component Cable for 480p - $10 Wii Fit - $100 Total: $420, plus another $200 in games (plus tax)
Looking back, I wished that I'd spent the money on PC and/or PS3 games and a better video card for my PC. I would have gotten a lot more out of it. If my wife will let me, I'll post my Wii on eBay and be done with it. She claims to like the Wii, but never actually plays it. Maybe having a Wii is some kind of modern day status symbol or something. I see it as an over-hyped gimmick of a video game system with only a few titles really worth playing. I know a lot of people out there really love their Wii, and I say good for them. For me, the novelty got old quick.
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