Yesterday I picked up the phone and did something I had never done before. I made a reservation .. for a Gameconsole ! Yep , its official, The Knightcastle is proudly expecting the arrival of one Nintendo Wii ! What else is new, I hear you mumble, well , for me thats kind of a big deal since I have not owned a game console since 1984 (Trusty Atari 2600 ) . I have passed up all the Sega"s so far, All the Dreamcasts, the Cubes, the Playstations (god forbid) and the X-boxes. Why ? Because I thought that gameconsoles where a complete waste of time. Sitting on the couch with some lame ass controller in your hands , hunched over while trying to steer some stupid little car through a maze was not my idea of a good time. If i did want to do something non-productive and de-stressing, a good game of Wolfenstein or Halflife on my PC would do the trick. And even that has been ages ago.
So why change my mind. I seldom play games, hate most console games anyway and whenever i"m NOT behind the computer, I kinda NOT want to be behind a computer. And the whole Graphics hype left me hot or cold aswell. Who cares that Laura Crofts breasts are now made up of 78 polygons instead of 23 ? If a girl like that ever existed in real life I doubt she would be able to do all those flipflops with a rack-like-that. I even dare to presume that standing UP would be her biggest challenge. Many arguments ( for example with one of our loyal listeners DJ Sharky) where about the spectacular evolution of graphic design but the stagnation in gameplay.
When I saw the Wii , it blew my mind. Not only did I applaud nintendo for their great innovations in gameplay on the Nintendo DS (A device I found utterly useless until I saw the Braingame) the hook line and sinker for me was that : This was a console for the family. Me and my wife love playing games together (retract mind from gutter please) and can get very competitive. We where looking at setting up a multiplayer Lan at home to talk out our differences over a good shoot-em-up, but Nyana doesn't really fancy the blood-and-gore. So imagine playing tennis together, bowling with the family, conducting an orchestra and all that jazz. The Wii would be the device for us, not only because of the freaky console but because of the "famlily centered" nature of the machine. Its not for nothing that the Wii is pronounced as WE (as in US). The gameconsole has torn the family apart for the last five years, and the Wii is going to glue them back together. I wonder what we will be taking along to this years christmass dinner at the inlaws… To keep everybody including ourselves, occupied.
Trackback to my first WII post : Things that make you go Wii