Brian Zhang Larsen’s Blog

Now the first weekend, with my very own Wii has passed, and very quickly indeed. My overall impression is good, and the concept truly works. Nintendo has always been good at social party games, and with the Wii they take this to a whole new level.

Wii Sport is an excellent bundle, and uses the different features of the Wii remote very nicely. Boxing is the only game that also uses the nunchuck, and is also the worst in my opinion. The game seems chaotic, and it is hard to really get the feeling. I had no really expectations of the baseball game, but damn it is satisfying to hit that ball. A nice plus is the ability to curve the ball while pitching.

Wii play is a bundle of mini games, which all in all are quite lame. But they live up to their purpose, which is to train the user in using the Wii remote, and focus on precise pointing in most of the games. If it wasn’t bundled with a Wii remote for a modest extra cost, I wouldn’t recommend buying it. But they are so… I don’t know really!

Apparently the game to get was the new Zelda, so off course I did. I have never before owned a Nintendo, and never tried a Zelda game before so I was pretty new to the story and the universe. The game makes excellent use of the Wii remote and the nunchuck, and every single button is used. It has been a long time since I played an action adventure game, … actually any game at all. And I am slightly annoyed about the constant chit chat, (without voice by the way, but text only), and the lack of freedom hence the predetermined path. But all that aside it is an great game for the genre.

The reason why I never owned a Nintendo is that I am a sega fanboy to the fullest. At least I used to be. I would pick Sonic over Mario any day, even now. I had to get my hands on Segas first release for the Wii as well, so I anxiously grapped Monkey Ball Banana blitz, on my early Friday Wii shopping Spree. A game with that title has got to be great right?!! Well, I still can’t answer that really. The main single player game works pretty well, and once again excellently makes use of the Wii remote for steering a ball through various obstacles in the pursuit of bananas. But the main reason of purchase was the party game feature. It has 50 mini games that can be played by 2-4 players, and all with various game play and fun factor. Some of them are quite fun, but some of them are really hard to catch the meaning of. Several of those games are hard, well almost impossible to play with the Wii remote. Sometimes you get the feeling that they haven’t event tried the games themselves.

I have always thought that party games were for consoles and first person shooters for PC. But with the Wii remote I am beginning to think that first person shooters could be possible for the Wii as well. It is not as precise, neither as fast as a mouse, but the shooting aspects of Zelda works pretty great anyway. I also like the way the controlling is split in two hands independently (unless you have very very long arms). I was afraid that the joystick on the nunchuck would be annoying, because I never liked the stick on the PS2 controllers. But it works pretty well until now. At a later point I might prefer a more old school type nunchuck-pad like the mysterious one below. [...]

It is a bit shame that the online channels are not finished yet, so no news and no weather in Europe. I love to virtually represent myself as one of the Mii’s you can create on the console, though. I cant wait to see a parade, and let my Mii’s meaningless wander to other friends Wii’s, so they can see how creative I am. Or is there another aspect of this that I miss to see?

Another great thing about the Wii is that it seems to be blister free. After a whole weekend of concetrated gaming, I still havent had any pain in my fingers at all…They really thought it through this time.

I was one of the few lucky ones that got it on the release date. Until now it is pure fun, as i had expected.

My Wii friend code is 7159-9443-3680-5819 btw, so feel free to add me.

Yesterday I went to the tiny danish equivalent of E3 and TGS, the D3 Expo here in Copenhagen to get a first impression of the new wonderful consoles that may await my consumption. The Wii was all I had expected. Fun and revolutionizing, and I am sure that there is potential in that little wonder for all ages. Nintendo had put around 22 of their Wii up for people to play, and that turned to be a quite satisfying number, hence the relative short lines, and the ability to show a broad aspect of their new games. Maybe they had overspend on this display, but what they spend they certainly saved on their lousy quality polo shirts, and cheap sneakers which their personnel were wearing. But hell.., the last thing I am is a fashion critic, and I think Nintendo did a marvelous job on promoting their upcoming console. Same could not be said about Sony and their Playstation 3. They had some top secret, closed doors promotion tactics that in my opinion was totally out of place. People had to stand in line for around 50 minutes, to get into some closed cubicle where they could see and play the PS3. It was not possible to view anything without standing in that line, and I think many including myself, where not up for that at all. I was very disappointed in Sony for their strange way of introducing their new product. I really looked forward to see it, but I became a bit stubborn, and decided not to when I experienced that the only possible way, where to wait and wait… In the end it is the little things that make the consumer settle on one product, over the other. In this situation I would say that Wii was the clear winner.

The D3 Expo where not really big, but still they managed to present the most interesting things in the main stream gaming world. But you could argue that it is quite easy to catch people’s interest at the moment, when the release of two new consoles is awaiting in the near future. A big disappointment though, where the lack of booth babes… Next year, you have to do better on this!

On the side note Yahoo just provided me some pleasant surprises. When I was geotagging my pictures for the expo, I discovered that yahoo maps now has much better support for Europe. They now include street maps to even small cities in Denmark and much better satelite detail than before. Now they really provide serious competition to Google in the world of geotagging and other geocoded applications.

Another funny discovery is that the Chinese yahoo offers free download of music. Besides the newest popular chinese music, you can find a lot of foreign music. It was quite a surprise, both because this most likely is illegal, and because I haven’t yet heard about any controversy concerning this. Even if it is not directly illegal, it must be against some kind of mission or value statements, and it could harm the image of the corporation. But I guess nobody in the headquarters can read Chinese, or nobody just cares about how they run the foreign platforms. And after all the Chinese interpret the phrase “copyright” to “the right to copy”.