Many Pies

Many Pies

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

A software engineer's view of the Wii

Thanks to a credit card which gives you vouchers if you put enough money through the card, we got a Wii for Christmas. I read a comment, answering the question why it has been so popular amongst "non-traditional gamers" - "it's the controller, stupid". And it really is. As well as all the directional stuff it does, what I didn't realise was that it does sound and rumble too.

If you've got one, this isn't news, but when you hit the tennis ball there's a "thwack" from your controller. No amount of clever 3d sound can imitate that. I'm also impressed by the detail on the animations of objects, like balls, pucks and other objects. It's obvious that a lot of care has gone into every detail. I particularly like the music that it makes (there's music for everything) when you're downloading updates. Thanks to everyone who got one for Christmas doing it on Christmas afternoon, I heard that music for a long time. It's all a bit like living in a white shiny space station.

There's some very astute cross promotion going of other Nintendo products, like the ability to download demo versions of DS games, but the biggest money for nothing must be the ability to download old console games and pay upwards of £5 for them.

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