I bought a Nintendo Wii for my workplace. It’s meant to provide a golf attraction to our housewarming party next month; I’m not in the party workgroup, but I think they’re going to set up a projected Wii Sports Golf and some fake grass in front of it. Oughta be popular.
Since the Wii came out, several people at work have bought it and it’s something of a Friday routine now that someone sets up their Wii in the lobby, coupled with a projector. It’s been rather popular. From now on we’ll have a “dedicated” Wii, we’ll see where it ends up. I do think it’s the perfect R&R investment – healthier than booze and because of the exercise, you probably won’t play for longer than a round at a time.
I don’t have a Wii at home. There is the fact that I can’t really afford it currently, but more importantly there simply isn’t anything besides the bundled Wii Sports and perhaps the latest Zelda that interests me. But now that I bought the office Wii on a Friday, I naturally took it home and did some testing.
Wii Sports is fun and works reasonably well. My hands ache and since I already got the flu, I’ll probably be double as ill tomorrow. The usual Wii virgin’s account of the initial experience, in other words.
I’d like to discuss the online experience. I am not thrilled. Major plus for the built-in wireless adapter. Connecting to my home network was effortless. Once you are actually online, it’s clear that Nintendo just doesn’t have the network expertise. Compared to the Microsoft experience, things don’t work that well. A big problem is speed – things are just sluggish – followed closely by a failure to communicate to the user. How complete is my download? How long will it take? Lack of background downloading felt very cumbersome.
The internal memory’s capacity is also a bit worrying, but I can’t comment on that much since I only downloaded the Internet channel (=Opera browser).
Overall, setting up the console was as easy as it could be, the Miis are fun, and, well, Sports is fun. It’s probably a great machine to have in the office, but currently I’m not that certain that I need one at home.
As I grumble, Nintendo is dominating homeland sales.
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