further impressions.

so now i've had a bit more of a chance to play wii games besides just losing tennis. wii golf is actually pretty cool (by which i mean i'm better at it than i am at wii tennis :) and it also adequately demonstrates the ability to play the wii like a toolbox.

he's really enjoying excite truck, except for the music. it apparently restricts him to a half hour of playing.

we also did manage to get it online, updated, and also redeemed 500 wii points to buy the original legend of zelda. apparently, we actually ended up lucky in this, because some people are reporting problems with nintendo's online service. i'm wondering if we didn't have any problems because we didn't get around to actually getting the thing online until later in the evening. we have 1500 points left waiting for further purchases, because currently, there aren't any other virtual console games we're interested in. there were reportedly supposed to be 30 titles at launch, but we did not see that many last night. i am also engaging in baseless speculation by pondering the idea that nintendo had to scale back their offerings a little because of network problems.

zelda is...pretty cool. frustrating at times: there are a lot of things to remember...like, if you're holding your lantern, you can still swing the sword just by waving the wiimote. for some reason, the sword isn't accessed by the B-trigger like other items. but then, i'm not much of a console gamer either. the much vaunted fishing takes forever, but i'm actually doing better at the puzzle solving in twilight princess than i was in wind waker. graphically, it's not the most impressive, but no launch title for any console is going to fully be able to take advantage of it, and twilight princess was always intended to be a gamecube game.

oh. he just downloaded a whole lot of music onto an SD card and is now playing excite truck to that.

anyway. for some reason, everyone was sold out of their nunchaku (and this time we're not alone). and i mean everyone: toys'r'us, gamestop, target, and circuit city. we didn't get a chance to check out best buy or the gamestop and eb games in the mall. maybe wal*mart would have nunchaku. except i'm boycotting wal*mart, in a passive-aggressive way. really though, the lack of a second nunchuck isn't in any way a disaster. i'm not interested in wii boxing, and zelda is the only other game we have that uses the nunchuck and that's sincle-player only.

the sensor bar, btw, is tiny. it's way smaller than it looks in the pictures. also, i believe only employees of nintendo call the main controller the "wii remote." i would like to know why they made the two buttons on the wiimote "1" and "2" instead of "X" and "Y" like they are on the gamecube controller and on the DS. it seems silly, since they kept "A", "B", "C", and "Z".

getting the wii itself was shockingly simple. we woke up at 10am, which was when toys'r'us was opening. we had coffee, read the newspaper, took showers, and then drove down (maybe if we'd managed to get there on time, we could have gotten the extra nunchuck, but i don't know how they would have handled line priority between campers and those who had secured pre-orders). got to toys'r'us, walked up to the videogames desk and proffered our pre-order tickets for the console and zelda. grabbed an extra wiimote off the racks. walked out.

whee! or wii! as you prefer.