I promise the title of this post will be my first and only Wii penis joke. Really.
Tonight, three years after its debut, I finally got a chance to play around with a Wii, thanks to an invite from Nic to try his out. He got it for the best price possible — as a prize in a raffle. Nice!
We played some Lego Batman after I got the lowdown on how to use the wand and nunchuk controllers and I think I did fairly well for a newbie. I had to play as Robin but hey, it’s Nic’s Wii so if he wants to play Batman, he plays Batman, dammit (and after watching how many times he plunged to his death while using the bat glide suit, I wasn’t too concerned about playing the sidekick). In one particular room we managed to kill ourselves repeatedly. I would push the joystick on the nunchuk and press the A button on the wand and Robin, the boy wonder, would happily walk off into a vat of lava or some toxic goo. Repeatedly. Being made of Lego grants you a kind of immortality, however, so the sting of death is not severe. We made a pretty good team, I’d say.
After putting away Mr. Freeze and Clayface, we moved on to the pack-in game, Wii Sports, testing out Tennis and Bowling. In Tennis we played two games. Nic beat me fairly handily in the first round as my fatheaded guys ran around the court looking more like rejects from Lord of the Dance than tennis players. The second game, however, found Nic without his mojo as he bobbled nearly every volley, handing me an easy win.
After drawing in Tennis we played a round of Bowling and I’m a bit concerned about Nic dislocating his shoulder when he plays the real thing because he puts some serious English into his swing. And it works. He got 5 strikes in all and ended with three in a row after finding the “magic spin”. I did not find any magic whatsoever and managed no strikes, though I got a few spares to stave off a humiliating defeat. Neither of us got a gutter ball.
Overall, the Wii left me unimpressed with its graphics (though being on a standard def TV probably doesn’t help much) but the controls were easy enough to grasp. The precision left something to be desired, though (see the countless deaths in Lego Batman as an example). While the party games are fun, I can’t say I’ve got a huge urge to trade-in my Xbox 360 for a Wii just yet.
Still, I must win at Bowling, so my Wii play is not over.