Wii Review - First Weekend

Short version: I love our Wii.

Random thoughts:

• Playing the Wii can be very tiring. My Wii came with a CD of sports games. My daughter tried them out and loved them. She did so much boxing that she worked up a sweat and ended up with sore shoulders. This is from a girl who is on a club soccer team where they practice two hours a day, three days a week. She's in excellent shape.


• The Wii has beautiful games. They may not be as photorealistic as the ones on the XBox 360, but there is a gentle beauty to them. My son and his friends play Call of Duty 4 on the 360 and while that looks pretty close to the real thing, it's a savage, jarring and unpleasant experience.


• Hooking the Wii up to the Internet was easy and free. It has built-in WiFi and connected to my router almost immediately. Wii online content is free. We haven't found friends yet, but that will come in time.


• Once you are online, the Wii has splash-page selections for weather and news. The weather feature looks a lot like Google Earth and allows you to not only pick locations by name, but scan the planet for weather. In keeping with the Wii theme, it's a pleasant and beautiful experience.


• Endless Ocean is a blast. I wish it was in hi-def and had a little better graphics, but it's still an excellent game. The lack of a time limit, a scoreboard or a real goal doesn't detract from it at all. In fact, it makes the game more fun. You simply explore the ocean. If you want, you can play a more goal-oriented game and take other divers (controlled by the game) on guided dives and show them whatever species of fish they ask for, but you can also just explore the water. After the kids have gone to bed, I turn off the lights and play the game. It's a great way to end the day.

Here's a video of game play. In the game, you can feed the fish. That's the orange cloud you see in the video. After you do that, you get some freeloaders that follow you around, hoping for more food. When I snorkel in real life, I like to bring frozen peas for the fish. The game captures the excited swarming that you get when you release the food into the water.