The Wii (pronounced “we,” not “why”) is about rescuing gaming from the clutches of the hard-core young male demographic that has dominated the industry’s thinking for years.
November 25, 2006 (Press Release) --
Judging by sheer silicon horsepower, the Nintendo Wii is the least powerful of the new generation of video game systems. But for many people it will be the most fun, and that’s what really matters.
Unlike Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3, the Wii does not produce eyepopping high-definition graphics. Unlike its brawnier and more expensive brethren, it does not feature an extensive online service built around multiplayer gaming. Unlike the 360 and the PS3, the Wii isn’t trying to be the most advanced digital entertainment system out there. Instead, the Wii (pronounced “we,” not “why”) is about rescuing gaming from the clutches of the hard-core young male demographic that has dominated the industry’s thinking for years. It is about making video games accessible again by providing a simple, intuitive, relatively inexpensive entertainment experience that an entire family can actually enjoy together.
At that, the Wii succeeds admirably.
So if you’re a hard-core gamer, the Wii, which was released Sunday with a $249 price tag, almost certainly won’t work as your primary system (and you probably knew that already). But if you’re anyone else — maybe you liked a few games back in college but haven’t touched one in years, or maybe you’d like to play with your kids but are intimidated by all those buttons and triggers, or maybe you just want to play casually with friends every so often — it is probably the machine for you. And, oh yeah, if you are a hard-core gamer the Wii can still make a nice change of pace. I’ve spent more than 25 hours using the Wii over the last two weeks, playing 12 different games, including almost all the titles initially available in North America. The system certainly is not perfect. For example, some of the Wii’s Internet services, like news and weather updates, aren’t functional yet. But over all the system left a big smile on my face.
More important, I have already seen the Wii appeal to people who would never pick up an Xbox or PlayStation controller. At Thanksgiving at my aunt’s house in New Jersey, there was my 59-year-old stepfather, who hadn’t touched a video game since Pong, locked in a tight golf match with my 21-year-old cousin. There was my aunt clamoring for her turn. And most shocking, there was my mother, 61, whom I had been trying to get into video games for two decades, playing tennis so vigorously she bruised her finger.
To understand why the Wii works so well, think about how video games have changed over the last 30 years. In the late 1970s and early ’80s, back when game machines could be widely found in public places like bars and Laundromats, the games were simple enough for anyone to just walk up and play. They usually had only one joystick and at most three buttons, if that. (Pac-Man famously doesn’t need buttons at all.) There was almost no intimidation factor.
Over the years, that changed. As video gaming largely left the public sphere and became something people do mostly at home, the games became more complex. Most modern video game controllers now have more than a dozen buttons, triggers and sticks.
And as the games (and the control schemes used to play them) became more complex, they naturally became more off-putting and alien to the everyday person. Video games became a niche hobby; they were banished to the kids’ room in the basement, figuratively and often literally.
Nintendo realized years ago that it simply did not have the financial and technical resources to compete with Microsoft and Sony in vying for those hard-core gamers who always want the latest, snazziest graphics, the most realistic physics modeling and all of the other bells and whistles that top-end systems so amply provide.
So Nintendo has shrewdly gone in the opposite direction. The Wii is meant to broaden the gaming audience yet again and turn on that broad swath of the population that got turned off by video games over the last two decades.
To do that, Nintendo has focused most of its innovation in the Wii on making the controls intuitive and easy to use. The main controller is a cleanly designed cordless unit that is generally held like a television remote, pointing at the screen. The real secret sauce in the Wii is that the user can just tilt and wave the controller to produce action on the screen, rather than having to figure out a lot of complicated button combinations.
On most menu screens, you can point the controller (and the little hand on the screen it controls) on the selection you want, like “New Game,” and press one big button. In a tennis game, you wait for the ball to come to you, then swing your arm as if you are, uh, swinging a tennis racket. In the sword-fighting sequences in a game like Red Steel, you swing one arm to control your sword while blocking incoming attacks with the broken blade in the other hand. To play golf, you just swing the controller like a golf club. If you tilt or swing off-line, you’ll hook or slice.
Perhaps my biggest revelation came playing the Wii version of Madden NFL 07. The Madden franchise is one of the all-time great video game properties, and it has always frustrated me that I am so horrible at it. That is largely because I have not mastered the truly byzantine range of extremely complicated button sequences that have been needed to play the game effectively on traditional game systems like PlayStation and Xbox. (Mastering such sequences and knowing when to use them is known among gamers, quite rightly, as skill.)
With Madden on the Wii, yes, I had to figure out some basic buttons to push, but the whole experience was refreshingly intuitive. To hike, jerk the hand up. To throw, make an overhead throwing motion. Do you want to plant a Heisman Trophy-like stiff-arm in that poor defender’s grill as you sprint toward the end zone? Just stick out your arm with authority. On the Wii, all of a sudden I was just playing football rather than trying to figure out whether I was supposed to hit the triangle button first or the square.
Over all, though, the one game that I thought best encapsulated what the Wii is all about was the delightfully madcap, over-the-top collection of mini-games called Rayman Raving Rabbids. As with the Wii itself, it can be hard to appreciate the emotive visual style of the game’s insane toilet-plunger-wielding rabbits and the joy of outrunning, outshooting, outjumping and, best of all, outdancing them until you get it in your hands. And as with the Wii itself, even my mother enjoyed it.
Author: SETH SCHIESEL
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/
Unlike Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3, the Wii does not produce eyepopping high-definition graphics. Unlike its brawnier and more expensive brethren, it does not feature an extensive online service built around multiplayer gaming. Unlike the 360 and the PS3, the Wii isn’t trying to be the most advanced digital entertainment system out there. Instead, the Wii (pronounced “we,” not “why”) is about rescuing gaming from the clutches of the hard-core young male demographic that has dominated the industry’s thinking for years. It is about making video games accessible again by providing a simple, intuitive, relatively inexpensive entertainment experience that an entire family can actually enjoy together.
At that, the Wii succeeds admirably.
So if you’re a hard-core gamer, the Wii, which was released Sunday with a $249 price tag, almost certainly won’t work as your primary system (and you probably knew that already). But if you’re anyone else — maybe you liked a few games back in college but haven’t touched one in years, or maybe you’d like to play with your kids but are intimidated by all those buttons and triggers, or maybe you just want to play casually with friends every so often — it is probably the machine for you. And, oh yeah, if you are a hard-core gamer the Wii can still make a nice change of pace. I’ve spent more than 25 hours using the Wii over the last two weeks, playing 12 different games, including almost all the titles initially available in North America. The system certainly is not perfect. For example, some of the Wii’s Internet services, like news and weather updates, aren’t functional yet. But over all the system left a big smile on my face.
More important, I have already seen the Wii appeal to people who would never pick up an Xbox or PlayStation controller. At Thanksgiving at my aunt’s house in New Jersey, there was my 59-year-old stepfather, who hadn’t touched a video game since Pong, locked in a tight golf match with my 21-year-old cousin. There was my aunt clamoring for her turn. And most shocking, there was my mother, 61, whom I had been trying to get into video games for two decades, playing tennis so vigorously she bruised her finger.
To understand why the Wii works so well, think about how video games have changed over the last 30 years. In the late 1970s and early ’80s, back when game machines could be widely found in public places like bars and Laundromats, the games were simple enough for anyone to just walk up and play. They usually had only one joystick and at most three buttons, if that. (Pac-Man famously doesn’t need buttons at all.) There was almost no intimidation factor.
Over the years, that changed. As video gaming largely left the public sphere and became something people do mostly at home, the games became more complex. Most modern video game controllers now have more than a dozen buttons, triggers and sticks.
And as the games (and the control schemes used to play them) became more complex, they naturally became more off-putting and alien to the everyday person. Video games became a niche hobby; they were banished to the kids’ room in the basement, figuratively and often literally.
Nintendo realized years ago that it simply did not have the financial and technical resources to compete with Microsoft and Sony in vying for those hard-core gamers who always want the latest, snazziest graphics, the most realistic physics modeling and all of the other bells and whistles that top-end systems so amply provide.
So Nintendo has shrewdly gone in the opposite direction. The Wii is meant to broaden the gaming audience yet again and turn on that broad swath of the population that got turned off by video games over the last two decades.
To do that, Nintendo has focused most of its innovation in the Wii on making the controls intuitive and easy to use. The main controller is a cleanly designed cordless unit that is generally held like a television remote, pointing at the screen. The real secret sauce in the Wii is that the user can just tilt and wave the controller to produce action on the screen, rather than having to figure out a lot of complicated button combinations.
On most menu screens, you can point the controller (and the little hand on the screen it controls) on the selection you want, like “New Game,” and press one big button. In a tennis game, you wait for the ball to come to you, then swing your arm as if you are, uh, swinging a tennis racket. In the sword-fighting sequences in a game like Red Steel, you swing one arm to control your sword while blocking incoming attacks with the broken blade in the other hand. To play golf, you just swing the controller like a golf club. If you tilt or swing off-line, you’ll hook or slice.
Perhaps my biggest revelation came playing the Wii version of Madden NFL 07. The Madden franchise is one of the all-time great video game properties, and it has always frustrated me that I am so horrible at it. That is largely because I have not mastered the truly byzantine range of extremely complicated button sequences that have been needed to play the game effectively on traditional game systems like PlayStation and Xbox. (Mastering such sequences and knowing when to use them is known among gamers, quite rightly, as skill.)
With Madden on the Wii, yes, I had to figure out some basic buttons to push, but the whole experience was refreshingly intuitive. To hike, jerk the hand up. To throw, make an overhead throwing motion. Do you want to plant a Heisman Trophy-like stiff-arm in that poor defender’s grill as you sprint toward the end zone? Just stick out your arm with authority. On the Wii, all of a sudden I was just playing football rather than trying to figure out whether I was supposed to hit the triangle button first or the square.
Over all, though, the one game that I thought best encapsulated what the Wii is all about was the delightfully madcap, over-the-top collection of mini-games called Rayman Raving Rabbids. As with the Wii itself, it can be hard to appreciate the emotive visual style of the game’s insane toilet-plunger-wielding rabbits and the joy of outrunning, outshooting, outjumping and, best of all, outdancing them until you get it in your hands. And as with the Wii itself, even my mother enjoyed it.
Author: SETH SCHIESEL
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/
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