Saturday, January 15, 2011

Wii First Impressions


Another first for our family, the kids got a Wii, most generously, from Emily's brothers and sisters-in-law, collectively.   Let me first say, WOW.   Very impressive.   It was a little touchy at first, trying the get the hang of the controller movement, but it's not too hard to get the hang of it.  Then I started to play Table Tennis on Resort Sports, which came with the unit.   I've played a lot of ping pong in my day, actually getting quite good (again, back in the day), so I know how to spin the ball and slam it and such.   This game actually responded to all of the different kinds of returns, sensing my wrist movements and position.   Very cool stuff.

Setup
Hookup was easy enough, although I was out of regular analog video inputs on the TV, so I purchased component cables from Best Buy.   I got the Rocketfish component cables, they were $10 less than Nintendo brand ones, but they seem to work just fine.  Good video quality for non-HD.   I also hooked it up to the internet wirelessly, though the only tangible benefit I've seen so far is that I can get the current weather report.   That was a slight challenge, but it was more due to my firewall configuration since the Wii doesn't seem to support WPA2 Personal / TKIP encryption, so I had to change my encryption to handle both TKIP and AES (using Tomato firmware, it was just a setting to change).

Gameplay
As I said earlier, it was a little touchy, but you get used to it.   I'm going to have to spend more time with it to really get a good handle on it, so I'm not the best person to review it yet.   I hope to get more games soon, like Tiger Woods '11 and Madden '11, and then I'll post again about my findings.   I guess there are worse ways to have to spend time.   We'll see if the kids let me get enough time in.   So far, it's a hit with the 9 year old, and even my 3 year old seems to like the Cars Race O Rama game.

More to come...

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