Some thoughts on the Wii

I saw Stardust tonight. I really liked it. Go see it, and find other ways of giving Neil Gaiman your money. He really deserves it more than you do, if you stop and think about it for a bit. (Other people who deserve your money more than you do include Shigeru Miyamoto, Mark Teixeira, Paul Westerberg and the late William Blake).

But that's not what I want to talk about as I try to get to sleep. I want to offer a few thoughts on the Nintendo Wii after about 10 days or so of owning one. (See how the Miyamoto reference earlier made the segue way more smooth? That's the kind of extra value you get here.)

I've been thinking about video games way too much lately (this is partly to blame on a podcast I came across called Retronauts that talks about old video games and I've been listening to obsessively) and it struck me that all three of the current generation of consoles has some key flaw. The PS3 costs way, way too much to even consider owning for someone like me, the XBox 360 breaks down way too much, and the Wii needs a bunch of good games to come out pretty soon if it wants to escape the spectre of being simply a fad.

With Metroid Prime 3 about to drop, and new Mario and Smash Brothers games on the horizon, the problem of not enough quality games might be solved soon, but I am curious if game developers will be able to make use of the whole wii remote thing, instead of being handcuffed by the unique controls. For example, being a big fan of the X-Men Legends games, I want to play the Marvel:Ultimate Alliance game, but the reviews for the Wii version pretty much all bitch about the control scheme. I've seen similar complaints about the new Madden game for the Wii.

The good news, theoretically, is that since Wiis are still flying off the shelves there will be a lot of incentive for game developers to produce games for the system. One of the key problems with the Gamecube and the N64 was the lack of a lot of quality non-Nintendo games, and the Wii should be able to avoid that.

Right.

I guess I don't actually have any insights.