Rick's World

Link: http://us.wii.com/

Yesterday, I bought a Wii! It took standing in line for an hour outside of Best Buy, but I got one. The Wii is Nintendo's new video game machine. I have to say that while the graphics are nowhere near as good as a PS3 or XBox 360, it is a lot of fun. It does a lot of interesting stuff.

Wireless networking

The Wii has built in wireless networking. I was easily able to get it connected to my home network and wirelessly update itself. The Nintendo DS also has wireless networking. I really like how Nintendo seems to be building in wireless networking into all their game machines these days. On top of that, they DON'T CHARGE to play games over the wireless connection. Granted, I don't know of any Wii games that play directly over the network, but I'm sure it's possible.

Browse the web

The Wii uses a version of the Opera web browser to allow you to browse the web using only the wireles s'wii-mote' remote. It actually works a lot better than I expected. Since TVs run at much lower resolutions than a computer, I expected the web pages to look horrible, since the web browser would have to try to render it at such a low resolution. It turns out that the way it works is that it shows the entire web site on screen, seemingly at a PC resolution but kind of shrunk down in size (sort of a 'photo-reduced' image of the site.) Then you can use the remote to scroll around the page and magnify whatever sections you want.

View Photos

The Wii includes a Secure Digital memory card slot that you can use for various things including viewing photos from a digital camera. It even does some nice little slideshows of the photos

Play MP3s

I haven't tried this yet, but supposedly it can play MP3s off of the Secure Digital card as well.

Buy older games online

I also haven't tried this yet. They have a bunch of old Sega Genesis, Nintendo 64 etc games available that you can buy and play on it.

It comes with a game

Most video game machines are sold as the machine only. They don't come with any games. The Wii comes with a game called 'Wii Sports'. It's a little game that lets you play Baseball, Tennis, Golf, Bowling, and Boxing using the wireless, motion sensitive remote. Granted the graphics on the game are very simple, but they are still fun little games to play and it's nice that it gives you something you can actually play with right out of the box.

I bought one game along with it - Marvel's Ultimate Alliance. (I'm a sucker for superhero video games). I've been playing this game for a while and it is a lot of fun. I'm still trying to get used to the motion controls though... It's very different from what I'm used to playing a game.

All in all, I gotta say, I like this little thing! It's a lot of fun!