Nintendo Experience

I won the opportunity to buy a Wii from Amazon. UPS delivered it three days later — Amazon apparently took a day more than usual to ship it. The results among my friends that also applied to win the opportunity to buy a Wii caused speculation about the effect of being an Amazon Prime member on one’s chances of winning.

Tennis and Bowling from Wii Sports were big hit among family members. I picked up an extra controller and we had lots of fun playing tennis and bowling. The other games on Wii Sports weren’t not so entertaining. I’m really looking forward to the “full” tennis and ping pong games for the Wii.

Red Steel is great fun until you run into a swordsman you can’t defeat, and then all the usual console-savepoint irritations return to haunt me. It’s probably a better translation of FPS controls into Wii than Far Cry: Vengance. I don’t much like how it forces me to use a sword to fight somebody when I’m carrying a submachine fun, a huge pistol, and a bunch of grenades, though. To me, “honorable” in a “rescue the girl” scenario doesn’t involve being all macho with a sword when the damsel is in trouble when I have more effective threat elimination tools available.

Far Cry: Vengance is pretty — at least as pretty as the first Far Cry on my PC — and is less particular than Red Steel about which of the many available tools I use to accomplish the goals. The controls are a little less natural for me than the Red Steel controls, but that may just be because I played Red Steel first.

These two games are the first first-person-shooters I’ve been able to really enjoy playing on a console because I don’t feel handcuffed by the controller. I don’t have to learn to aim using a tiny thumbstick.

Setting up the networking was easy and it integrated easily with my WEP-enabled network. The web browser demo worked a lot better than I expected. I may even pay for it when it leaves the demo mode.

I plan to get Zelda but only after I’m done playing Red Steel and Far Cry. It’s bad enough that I got two games at once.

DS Lite

Brain Age was also a big hit — I had to keep a vigilant eye on the DS lite to ensure I returned home with it. Brain Age is kind of fun and I’ve also spent some quality airplane time with the new super mario game. I was much happier with the DS lite before I had to return it because the screen flaked out. No doubt I’ll have more to say about it when I have a working one again…