CDN This Week’s focus is on corporate computing and the channel, not necessarily gaming even though a small portion of our readership does sell home entertainment equipment.
However, when Nintendo is offering a sneak preview of its next-generation platform, you jump at the chance, especially when it involves spending the morning out of the office and its teetering piles of page proofs, invoices and general paperwork.
You may have heard of Wii (pronounced “wee,” and thus likely to be the butt of many sophomoric jokes). You might have read about it or perhaps even seen news clips. Well, I’ve played a unit, so there (he said, sticking his tongue out tauntingly).
Nintendo of Canada set up in a two-storey suite in a posh Toronto boutique hotel and invited journalists to have a bash at it. I’m not much of a gamer myself – I routinely get beaten like a drum by my eight-year-old – which actually makes me the dead centre of Nintendo’s target market.
Games have become increasingly complex, with steep learning curves and the necessity for lightning-fast thumb reflexes. That’s what’s steered me away from gaming. I want to fritter away some time and have some fun, not turn it into work. That’s exactly the market Nintendo is aiming Wii at, says Pierre-Paul Trépanier, Nintendo of Canada’s director of marketing: people who’ve never been into gaming, or have walked away from the six-button combination moves and complex game play.
Wii is designed to be intuitive and fun right out of the box. In testimony to this, the Nintendo reps didn’t demo the platform for the journalists; they simply handed us the controller, gave us a couple of brief instructions, and let us have at ‘er.
The controller is a motion-sensing wand with a trigger and a few buttons. Depending on the game you’re playing, you hold the wand differently – with both hands, like a steering wheel, for driving games; like a tennis racquet or baseball bat for sports titles; like a sword for first-person dust-‘em-ups. Move naturally, and the game reflects it.
First up was a driving game, Excite Truck, wherein you race through the wilds of Mexico in a turbo-charged pickup. The game gives points the ridiculous amounts of air time you get at the crest of hills, crashes, tree runs – pretty much rewarding you for everything that jacks your insurance rates through the roof. (The Sierra Club will be up in arms – you hit so many trees, it might as well be called Excite Deforestation.)
Next was WarioWare: Smooth Moves, from a genre of microgames that is wildly popular in Japan, though it hasn’t caught on here. The game tells you how to hold the controller – like an umbrella, like a waiter’s tray, on top of your head – then the game itself appears. For example, a fly and fly swatter appear on screen. The game about five seconds long. That gives you just about enough time to figure out what you have to do – swat the fly — and do it. Then on to the next microgame, and the next, and the next, at a pace that becomes increasingly frantic, with an ADD-afflicted randomness. (Whoever took the pictures of me, in tweed jacket and dress pants, clutching the controller to my side and swiveling my hips to activate an on-screen hula hoop: Please delete them. It wasn’t poetry in motion.) It would be a hilarious cocktail party activity.
The Wii Sports package shows the potential of the interface. Tennis is perfectly intuitive: simply swing the wand like a racquet. The racquet responds to how you swing and how hard you swing. A feedback mechanism provides a surprisingly accurate string vibration.
It’s addictive and compelling, and more importantly, I won in straight sets over the guy from Urban magazine who kicked my ass at Duck Hunt. (Nintendo of America product tester Shane Lewis tells of a recent demo in which two female journalists were getting wildly enthusiastic and competitive. One clipped an onlooker with her follow-through, leaving a bruise. He stepped back away from the action, only to catch a backhander from her opponent.)
Then there’s Orchestra, which, sadly, probably won’t be a production game, according to Lewis. As you wave the wand like a conductor’s baton, a cartoon orchestra plays in time. Hold notes, slow down, accelerate – put your own stamp on Carmen (or the theme music from Nintendo’s Zelda franchise). It brought spontaneous rounds of applause from an audience of jaded journos.
There’s support for the traditional Nintendo games and controllers, too, and an online archive of historic Nintendo offerings. That should keep the folks with muscular thumbs happy. Nintendo’s promising Wii-optimized games from franchises like Sonic, Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy and Madden NFL from third parties as well.
But the point of Wii is in its accessibility. The characters (in the games we played, anyway) are cartoony, the graphics certainly aren’t Xbox 360 calibre, but grasp of game play is almost instantaneous – simple, intuitive and fun. Hardcore gamers might sneer, but Wii isn’t aimed at them. It’s aimed at 42-year-olds who don’t want to spend hours learning how to play video games but still want a little diversion.
Dave Webb, surprisingly, is 42 years old, doesn’t want to spend hours learning how to play video games but still wants a little diversion.
