I've always been a PC gamer, and have previously never even considered buying a console. That's mostly because of brief attempts to use console controllers on demo stands and utterly hating them, but also because I've never seen the point of playing games on a console when my well-specced PC offers similar games with decent mouse control, wheel+pedals or joystick. (Oh, and I'm a WoW-player these days, so I don't really play any other games)
However, Wii tempted me just enough to go out and get one, mostly just as a quick "family" blast and something fun to do when people come to visit. I also saw the Wii demo station in one local store and was rather surprised at how poor the in-game pictures looked, but I risked a purchase anyway. So far I'm very happy with my first ever game console, and I'd say it looks considerably better on my home TV than the Wii demo station (in case others are also worried about that).
I bought the Wii console together with Wii Play (for the second remote), because I wasn't sure what to expect, but I'll be picking up Zelda as soon as I can find it on a store shelf.
Wii Sports:
Baseball was the only real "dud" to my mind, since there just seems to be too little control nuance available, and the game is simplified too far.
Boxing is fun but suffers from difficulty getting the controller response you are after (I guess this means I need to practice more) and I would need to actually find a second nunchuk to be able to play it 2 player.
Golf, Tennis and Bowling were all excellent fun. They all required about half an hour to figure out what sort of gestures the game responds to best, but even from the start they were great fun to play together with the rest of the family.
Overall I'd say that Wii Sports is way more than some kind of "tech demo". You get pick-up-and-play fun to be shared with every guest to turn up at your house for months to come, and multiple players is where the fun is, not playing against the computer AI. Obviously we're not talking about a simulation here, but an easy-to-play game, and yet there is definitely sufficient nuance available to ensure that the "better" player can win.
Wii Play:
It's cheap (only a few euros on top of the controller price, not that you can buy the controller separate from Wii Play in europe at the moment). Of the 9 included games, there are 3 which I can see myself playing for long. However, I do appreciate that the "simpler" games are probably ideally suited to kids.
Many of the games use the Wii Controller pointer mode, e.g. to shoot targets on the screen or move objects around. My girlfriend (who only ever plays those simple free download games from MSN) wiped the floor with me pretty much every game, proving very neatly that aptitude with mouse and PC games does you little good when you switch to a Wii
The most fun games in the bundle are laser hockey and the tank game. Laser hockey is a very nice interpretation of Pong for 2 players, and looks to have enough interest to last quite a while. The tank game is a blast and it will probably outlast the others. The pool game could be decent if I could figure out how to get better cue control - it was very very hit and miss so far, with me just as likely to end up rolling the cue ball 10cm as thundering a shot to send the entire table into motion. As it is, it just reminds me how effective Virtual Pool was with it's mouse-controlled cue movement.
How good are those controllers then?
All in all, the Wiimote was more successful than I had imagined. Yes, you can just make small wrist movements, but it's fun to make realistic movements and have them treated as such, and you do get a nice workout in the process. Much much much better than twiddling your thumbs and wondering when you'll get RSI!
However, there are definitely also weak spots: I am finding movements directly towards the sensor bar to be erratic (compared to the other two dimensions which work fine). This means that it sometimes doesn't register punches, very gentle golf puts often refuse to register since there you are only really moving the Wiimote directly towards the screen, and as mentioned earlier pool cue moves are very difficult to control accurately.
I was wondering if anyone has tried recalibrating the controllers. I just turned my Wii on, told it that the sensor bar was above the TV, and started playing. I'm hoping that I can find a calibration routine to get my perpendicular movement behaving more accurately.
I found it very interesting to watch "hardened" console gamers analyze the Wii. All I can say is: "Guys, this console is so totally not aimed at you, get over it". This console is aimed at all those households which have never contemplated a game console. It's aimed at providing fun family entertainment where previously you'd have been playing a board game at the dinner table. And I think Nintendo has succeeded. I would never have dreamed that I'd one day actually own a Nintendo, and yet they sucked me in with that controller and that promise of easy-to-use fun gameplay. And I'm enjoying it. More importantly, so is my girlfriend.
