Nintendo, Wii Have Liftoff

This weekend I was driving through the East Bay, when I noticed a Gamestop store nearby. Normally, I would have kept driving, but I wasn’t in a hurry and having canceled my Gamefly membership, it’s been a while since I’ve checked out any new games, so I decided to stop in and see what they had.

I usually buy my video games from whatever store is closest to me, but Gamespot is one of those rare stores, where I actually enjoy shopping. Normally, when I go shopping, I just want the employees to leave me alone and let me get in and out with the product I’m interested in, but at Gamespot, the employees are the best part of the store. I don’t go there to buy things, I go there to graze. Unlike the employees at Best Buy or CompUSA, Gamespot employees are usually working there because they love video games.

I’m not sure if they get free rentals or discounts or if it’s just that Gamespot attracts employees who like playing every game that comes out, but every time I go in their store, the employees give me customized game reviews on any title that I’m interested in.

Because these employees tend to be hardcore gamers, I have to be careful to not always pick the games that they are fanatical about, but I still listen to what they have to say and more than once, they’ve saved me from buying a bad game.

When I dropped into Gamespot this weekend, I wasn’t planning on buying anything. I just wanted to know if there were any new games coming out. Once I started to talk with the clerks though, one of them pulled me off to one side and in hushed tones, told me that they had one more Wii tucked away in the back of the store.

By the way they told me about the Wii, you would have thought that they were selling illegal fireworks left over from the Fourth of July, but when a console has been this hot, for this long, I can understand why they would speak about it with a strange sort of reverence.

Apparently they had gotten a shipment just the day before, and the Wii they had in stock, was the last one left from the batch. Even before I went into Gamestop, I had toyed with the idea of buying a Wii, but had not made a decision about whether or not I really wanted one. Since I knew that the Wii’s were still pretty hard to come by and because they told me, it was the last one, I made a quick decision to buy it and figured I could always flip it on Ebay, if it didn’t live up to the hype.

When I took the console home, I was eager to try it out. I had read a lot of the reviews on the Wii, but nothing had prepared me for what the experience would really be like.

When I was a kid, my parents used to take me to Zuma beach in Southern California. Even though, I didn’t know how to surf at the time, I must have been born with a pair of extra flippers or something, because they could not keep me out of the the water. From the moment we would arrive until the moment we left, I would spend the day splashing about the water, just about as happy as I could be. Whether it was body surfing through the waves or just swimming along the coast, no matter how cold and shriveled I was, I never wanted to get out.

After I would go home for the day, I would be dog tired, but when I would lay down, I could still feel the up and down motion of the tide. I’m not sure what the medical name for this effect is, but the sensation would stick with me for a night and would go away until my next trip to the Pacific Ocean.

Since moving to San Francisco, I haven’t spent anytime in the ocean and had almost forgotten about this sensation, but after spending all day Saturday playing the Wii, I was surprised when I closed my eyes and felt the same sensation creep over me.

Instead of an up and down tide motion though, I felt like I could fly. Something about the visual aspects of playing the game, combined with the physical exertion required to control the characters had burned the experience into my sub-conscious and made it feel like I was still playing, even after the console had been shut off.

The one big downside (or upside, depending on how you look at it) of the Wii, is that because it’s such a physical process to play, you can’t play for 12 hours straight like you can other consoles.

When I was a kid, I would have friends over and we would play the Nintendo all night. Eventually, someone would pass out from too much caffeine or red vines. If I try to play the Wii all night though, it’s not a caffeine overdose that makes me stop, my body eventually goes kaput and my muscles say no more.

While I’m sure that owning the Wii will help to improve my conditioning, when you can barely lift your arms over your head, it makes the thought of playing another quick game less appealing, than some of the less active forms of gaming.

Overall though, I’m really pleased with my new console. My only legitimate complaint, is that the graphics aren’t very impressive. Of course, I knew that this was the case going in, but I still expected them to be a little bit better than what they really are.

It could just be that the Wii isn’t designed to be played on a big screen TV, but when you play the console on a big screen, you can really see how rough the pixels look. It’s still way better than the original Nintendo, but the graphics do make me feel like I’ve taken a step back in the evolution of my video gaming.

When the Xbox 360 came out, they made a big deal about the HD graphics that they had, but I never realized how important this was, until I saw the quality of the Wii. What the games lack in graphics though, they make up for it with the fun factor.

When playing Zelda, instead of mashing buttons to make your way through the fighting scenes, you use the joystick like a sword. I can’t over-emphasize how much fun this is. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, a monster will jump at you and you have to dodge, twist, turn and slash, all in real life, in order to dice your way through each level. This adds a dimension to gaming that is way beyond 3D. It’s like you are out there by yourself, fighting to save the princess.

While I’ve only been playing for two days and I haven’t gotten to try out many games yet, I can already tell that this will be my new #1 console. As much as I like the Wii though, it still won’t be able to replace my Xbox 360.

If a game is especially dependent on graphics or if it’s exclusive to Microsoft, I still plan on buying it for the Xbox, but if a game involves a lot of physical characteristics, than I’m likely to buy the Wii version instead. I am especially excited about trying out John Madden’s football game on the console. It’s been a long time, since I’ve seen any real improvements to this title, but Madden on the Wii, will be like a whole new game. I just hope I don’t get so excited, that I end up breaking my TV, throwing touchdown bombs to Randy Moss.

Davis Freeberg is a technology enthusiast living in the Bay Area. He enjoys writing about movies, music, and the impact that digital technology has on traditional media. Read more of his musings at www.davisfreeberg.com.