Nintendo Wii just plays games

Stan Beer
Wednesday, 10 May 2006 08:27

Your IT - Home IT

The unveiling of Nintendo's new games console, with the much discussed title that everyone now remembers, hammered home a point that seems to have been forgotten by its two bigger rivals. The Nintendo Wii will not be a full-blown home entertainment unit with high definition video and other fancy accoutrements; but it will be a damned good games console with a damned good control unit.

And you have to hand it to Nintendo. The release of the controller is about six months away, there is no pricing except a vague hint that it will be cheaper than its rivals, yet the marketing message is simple and powerful. Wii sounds like "we", which is meant to imply that the game console is for the whole family. And the appeal is supposedly to a wide multi-generation audience of gamers who supposdly long for simpler times when games were events played together by all members of the family.

The TV remote shaped controller is supposedly so easy and intuitive, that Nintendo claims anybody from children to grandparents will find it easy to pick up and use. Plus up to four blue-tooth connected controllers can be used at once, adding to the feeling of inclusiveness. The controller itself will provide motion sensitivity to enable gamers to guide their guns and swords through arm rather than just thumb movements.
 
The Nintendo Wii will not have anywhere near the memory capacity of the Xbox 360 or PS3, with just 512M of Flash, expandable (to how much?) via an SD memory card bay. It also has two USB 2.0 ports, is WiFi enabled and can connect to the internet, giving users the ability to download and play games of yesteryear from the Nintendo 64, Super Nintendo and even Sega Genesis platforms.

Nintendo also promises that it hasn't forgotten the "core gammer" - the one who likes to play the sort of games most of us can't get into - and claims that the Wii, powered by IBM's PowerPC processor, will provide the best gaming experience yet. However, as is the case with PS3, six months is a long time to wait.