Stuff I Love: My Wii
I recently purchased a Wii and immediately downloaded my favorite childhood games – Mario Bros. and Sonic 2. I also have Mario Galaxy but don’t want to play it until I get through Mario Bros. one more time.
I thought this video was funny because while looking for games at the Union Square Gamestop, I found a lot of their titles to be pretty lame.
Despite that, I chose the Wii over other consoles for the following reasons:
1) I am going to buy Wii fit next week and use it to tone the bod’ (in the privacy of my home). I had to cancel my gym membership last fall because of budget concerns. I am hoping this thing pays for itself – if all goes to plan it will do that in four months.
2) I wanted a console that was social in a way that works for me. I want to be able to exercise with friends (the ones I can trick into doing that), download more classic games
and be able to browse my favorite websites from the couch. I also already pay for wifi and found the setup really easy.
3) Movement. I wanted to be able to play fun games that didn’t restrict me to sitting on the couch. We Ski & Snowboard is available in stores today and as soon as I have Wii Fit I am probably going to cop it, because it looks interesting and requires me to get off my ass.
So far, I am enjoying the system but have found a few problems:
1) When I browse many of my favorite sites, I can’t view related video through my TV. Wii (as far as I can tell) doesn’t support a lot of formats. This is minor but with all the bells and whistles the Wii offers, you would think they would figure out a way to resolve this by now, especially with more adults purchasing Wii systems these days.
2) Wii doesn’t work well with Facebook or other social networking sites. I can access/login, but when I try to update status, visit other pages, or really do anything aside from viewing the homepage I’m pretty stuck. This also happens on NYtimes.com through the Wii. Twitter does work well through the Wii, for some reason.
3) You can’t copy/paste text so filling in fields on websites is a chore.
I’m not a hardcore gamer and probably never will be. I spend a lot of time at work and wanted a system that allowed me to have fun WHILE moving my body, in relatively short chunks of time. I can’t commit to 20+ hours a week on a single game so the Wii was a happy compromise.