Nintendo Wii

Another Nintendo breakthrough

Wii looks cute. My first experience was in Valley Fair where Nintendo had an open demo. I liked it immediately. The control part was not hard. Non professional gamers like me could get tons of fun from Wii.

The second try was in Navaline's place. That night we had four people: Navaline, Laurent, and us. Wii came with Wii Sport. We tried Tennis first. The motion was easy. I got some Aces accidentally. The computer opponent was a bit difficult for me (others did not have any problems to beat computer. Only me). I had tried at least 3 times. I got some luck and defeated my opponent eventually. Everyone liked tennis a lot.

We then tried Bowling. I barely played bowling. I only knew my goal was to get a turkey. Turkey? In real bowling, when a player got three strikes in a row, the player would get a turkey on the screen. For me, I did not expect to see a turkey. A spare was good enough for me. I knew I would be thrilled if I got a strike.

Here came the beauty of Wii. With the controller, you could adjust spin, direction, and start point. As long as your arm did not shake, you had a good chance to having a strike. Of course, sometimes you would encounter some difficult situation: two pins left and one on each side. Based on our experiences, everyone got good scores, at least 100.

After bowling, we tried golf. Golf was intuitive. You turned 90 degree and held both hands on the controller the same way you would do for your golf club. Then, kneed a bit. Then, swung. Wii tried hard to mimic golf. With the controller, players could adjust efforts (one to four points. Four points are the maximum. If you swing too hard, your ball will be under control. It can go anywhere it likes) and adjust directions (to follow or go against wind). With the map on the right hand corner, players knew how far from the hole and how strong the wind was. Players could also change clubs. If you did not like the default club, you could switch to another one. One amazing thing was that players could see the contour and knee down the character when the balls were on green. Quite real. We initially just wanted to see how Wii designed golf games. It turned out the golf game was my favorite among these Wii Sports.