02.04.07

The Wii honeymoon is over

Posted in games at 11:51 pm by wingerz

Of course I love the Wii. Nearly everyone who has come to visit over the past two months has been treated to the joys of Mii creation and Wii Sports. The recently deployed News Channel is pretty cool – it collects AP stories to be viewed either by category or location. I think it’s a great tool for learning geography, especially for children: it’s just cool to spin the globe around to see what’s happening in Australia. But two things have been bugging me recently.

Lack of simultaneous multiplayer in Ware Ware. I’ve been tempted to pick this game up, but the lack of multiplayer just kills it for me. It’s got turn-based multiplayer but that doesn’t have quite the same intensity. I understand that previous incarnations of Wario Ware haven’t had strong multiplayer support, but they should have made an exception for the Wii, which is meant to be a more social machine. That, along with the fact that most people can unlock most of the content in two hours means that I’m not spending $50 on it.

Lack of network support. Apparently Nintendo has been pretty tight-lipped about the networking APIs with third parties, AND none of their games currently support network play. And I might actually decide to buy a Virtual Console game if they supported network multiplayer (All I’d need is Tetris Attack, SFII, and MK64). It took Nintendo about a year to get their act together with the DS; hopefully it’ll be faster this time around since they’ve got Nintendo Wi-Fi up and running.

Until something else comes along, I’ll be catching up on some old GameCube and PS2 games. Have been playing a bit of Katamari, which is delightful.

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