The Nintendo Wii launched in North America on November 19th, 2006. After almost two months of searching I was finally able to purchase one last week. All right it wasn't exactly two months of searching, I was hoping that I would get one for Christmas but no one else in the family was able to find one for me. I did spend a a few days driving all over Ottawa and Gatineau looking for a store that had a system in stock. I must have visited about thirty stores minimum. I'm sure some of you are thinking that I'm crazy. I started my quest in earnest back on Dec 27th with my brother. The first store we went to had no Wii's surprise surprise, but they did have PS3's. Which my brother snapped up quite quickly. Without getting to technically geeky the PS3 is much more advanced than the Wii in a processing capacity and technological advances, but I have always been a huge fan on Nintendo and their games.
My addiction goes all the way back to the original Nintendo Entertainment System known as the NES. I spent hours playing Super Mario Brothers on that system and to this day I have never actually completed the game.
That lead to the Super NES a few years later and more Mario games.
Next up was the Nintendo 64 and arguably the greatest Super Mario game of all time. Super Mario 64. Recently resurrected on the Nintendo DS.
Not long ago Nintendo said goodbye to the cartridges that had given them years of financial success and switched to cute little cd's, with the launch of the GameCube. The system launched with Mario Sunshine yet another award winning game staring that fantastic little plummer named Mario.
That brings us to the present and the Wii. If your not familiar with the new system the major technological advance is the controller. Nintendo has really been considered a third place player in the console wars for the last few years. The sales of the PS2 and the Xbox eclipsing that of GameCube. So what did the bigwigs at Nintendo decide to do? Go after the non-traditional gamer. When Will Wright and Maxis tried this with the development of the Sims game they tapped in to a market that was largely ignored and produced the largest selling game of all time. Nintendo focused on making a controller that was accessible to everyone. They eliminated as many buttons as possible and made the controller motion sensitive. So all you have to do is basically wave the controller at the screen and the characters will respond accordingly. Since I got my Wii home and took it out of the box I have conducted I highly scientific experiment with my friends and family. Over the last week we have had many people over to play, with their ages ranging from late twenty's to their earlier sixties and there has yet to be a person who didn't enjoy playing Wii sports. This system is going to be huge. I guess its already huge selling almost 2 million units since its launch. Now the countdown begins for Mario Galaxy which is expected to go gold in March.
Here is a video in the style of the PC and Mac commercials comparing the benefits of the PS3 and the Wii. Enjoy.
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