Bishop:
The Nintendo Wii is arguably the best bang for your buck in the entire interactive entertainment industry. If you can imagine walking into a practically boundless arcade with 1000 quarters and coming out empty handed, you can easily justify it’s (comparatively tiny) purchase price of $250.It’s a small, unassuming console that aims to fit neatly into one’s living space rather than demanding center stage. It’s user-friendly. It’s even kinda cute. And what’s more, it seems designed from the outset to target demographics that don’t normally purchase game consoles.Demographics, oddly enough, like me. I have never yet owned a Nintendo, a Playstation, an XBox, a Sega, a Jaguar, an Atari… You name it, I haven’t played it. I cut my teeth on IBM/Compatible PC games at the tender age of five and I haven’t looked back — or at least not until recently.
The PC is (in)arguably the superior platform for almost any genre you’d care to explore. The unopposed king of the First Person Shooter, the MMORPG, and the Flight Simulator, the PC also has significant market presence in plenty of other categories that make it more than capable of holding its own in any direct comparison made by a gamer.But that’s where the PC’s sheer power and multifaceted prowess begins to pale a bit in comparison to the Wii, isn’t it?
The Wii doesn’t appeal to the gamerin me. The Wii appeals to the guy who sees a cool toy and just wants to play with it. (Shudder!)
But the gamer in me can’t bring himself to purchase one just yet, even with its cost at around the price tag of my next five PC titles or my next MMORPG binge. Because, in the end, that’s what the Wii is right now: just a cool toy.
The Wii is a cool toy that also happens, seemingly by chance, to run video games. Even the Wii’s best titles are either upstaged or outright hampered by the console’s unique (revolutionary? We’ll see) control mechanism. Smash Bros. Brawl, for instance, supposedly supports the use of plain old Gamecube controllers in addition to the use of the wiimote. Perhaps simply because Nintendo had to confess that there are just some things that should be played the old fashioned way?
Maybe not. But, certainly, actual innovations in gameplay should not take a backseat to innovations aimed at shoehorning in a new interface.
Moreover, the interface should not be a feature. No one sells a First Person Shooter by virtue of its 360 Degree Mouselook Control! By the same token, no one should sell the next iteration of Legend of Zelda by saying, “Look! You can hold up your sword with one hand and your shield with the other!”
The interface should be transparent. It should not be part of the player’s overall experience except in that it allows the player to have the experience. Like good writing, the player shouldn’t really notice it.
Of course, there was a time when I felt that controlling my rifle by means of a mouse was counter-intuitive and, indeed, counterproductive. After all, enemies only appear on the horizontal plane 90% of the time — why would I want to introduce the possibility of vertical errors?
But games have changed since 1993 and the mouse+keyboard combo has been the accepted modus operandi for FPS players the world over for more than a decade. Perhaps the wiimote, too, will be accepted and forgotten in the same way? For now, however, the Wii’s controller remains Nintendo’s greatest marketing tool and the developer’s (and by extension the gamer’s) greatest hurdle.
2Cold Scorpio:
Why I don’t have a Wii…well, first off because even at a paltry $250 (which is about what new consoles used to cost before the damned XBox and PS3), I can’t afford one (yet). Why? I dropped over $1,800 on a fairly high-end gaming PC (not bleeding edge by any means, but anything except Crysis flies on my baby). Why? Because for the past six years, my old laptop couldn’t play anything made after 2002, with the exception of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republicand its sequel The Sith Lords, except at the absolute lowest settings (hell, it didn’t even meet the minimal requirements!). During those six years, I missed Doom 3, Half-Life 2 (and its following episodes), Far Cry, The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion,and many other great games. I did play the hell out of my GameCube during that time, and later my PS2 (which I had bought after GC games started drying up…I saw very little I wanted).Then the new wave of consoles came. Of course, I wanted a PS3 (and still do), and once again, the XBox had nothing that appealed to me, and had acquired a frightening hardware failure rate that gave me yet another reason to stay away. The Wii was an interesting breed, though…the graphics hadn’t improved much (if at all) from the old GameCube, it didn’t play DVD movies (which is so commonplace these days for consoles and of course PCs), but it had a really different controller. Something that, in my very limited experience with, is fun…for a while. But then your arms get tired. Hell, I play games to relax, enjoy a good story, get away from life, and blow shit up. The first is a bit hard to do flailing around like a drunkard in a pool. Yes its fun, but its something that’s more fun with other people. Sure, you can play many of these games with a standard controller. But then all you have is a white GameCube that looks like it got sat on by a fatass bus driver, then turned on its side. The hardcore gamer in me who constantly wants better graphics and sound, and realistic physics sees nothing he likes…Except for two things: a small amount of new games so damned good I don’t care if they don’t look much better or have strange controls and access to classic games I grew up on (and and that are *still* fun as hell).
The Wii’s Virtual Console is the main reason I want the damned thing: for a fee between $5-10, I can replay and re-own many classic games I grew up on. Granted some of the stuff I want to play most isn’t there yet (and in the case of GoldenEye and Perfect Dark, may never be), there’s still plenty of classics available. You’re probably asking “You would pay $250+ dollars just to play The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Super Metroid, Punch-Out!, and the original four Super Mario Bros.games?” Yes, I would, if I had the wampum to spare. Now, if I had $500+ in my pocket today, I’d get a PS3, hands down, even if my old CRT standard-definition TV would bottleneck its greatness. But if I had slightly less, I’d get a Wii in a heartbeat, just for the Virtual Console games. And besto all, the Wii wouldn’t suffer from my aging television.
Reason number two: I would get a Wii is the newest Zelda (which I never picked up for the Cube), the newest Metroid, the new Smash Bros., and the new Mario Kart. There aren’t many Wii games I care for, but those are almost worth the price of the console by themselves (hell, the VC alone is worth it, so this would be like a pricey bonus).
So, yeah, the Wii for me is little more than a nostalgia box that could also replace my failing GameCube flawlessly, and that has a couple of interesting games. Quite different than what most folks are buying ‘em for. I guess I kinda see it as a toy, too. However, even as a toy, if it can play Super Mario Bros. 3 it’s worth it. Especially if Final Fantasy VI (known as FF3 when it was released in America for the SNES some thirteen years ago) finds its way to the VC. When that happens, I’ll be out selling shit just to buy a Wii for that alone. It’d be worth it. 
In case you’re wondering what the point was of the first part of what I typed, it’s this: I could have bought all three major new consoles for what I paid for my PC. The PC was well worth it. But next, I look to eventually get a Wii and PS3…the PS3 is for the new games. The Wii is (mainly) for the old. The motion-sensing stuff and new versions of old classics (like The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and Metroid Prime 3), are just icing on the cake.
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