Anyone else got one?

I'm actually a bit disappointed with my early stroke-of-amazing-luck Christmas present It's the only time I've brought a new console and not had some kind of "Wow! Great things lie ahead!" feeling. I find I'm slowly feeling gutted.

First the general good of the console:
The analogue stick on the nunchuk is nice. Best I've used, to be honest. Very responsive, and it feels right. The part where your thumb rests is coated in a very grippy rubbery substance, so chances of thumb slippage are slim.

It's a dinky little console. Cute.

Wireless controllers means no wires. Yay!

The wii-mote has rumble built in. Nice, considering a lot of other wireless controllers don't.


The general bad:
You can't turn the console off unless you unplug it. Most won't care about this, but as I have the console in my bedroom I do. I don't want power lights on while I'm trying to sleep.

I can't sit down to play. I have to stand up or most of my wii-mote swinging isn't picked up. In the course of a typical working day I walk approximately 5 miles and stand for 9 hours. I don't want to be forced to stand when I'm trying to relax. I've discovered another flaw to this: I hurt my knee two days ago. I haven't been able to play my Wii for two days because standing is painful. So much for the generic console advantage of being able to sit comfortably while playing, and playing while ill.


I have two games: Zelda and the copy of Wii Sports which comes bundled.

Zelda is fine - it's Zelda for heavens sake! Except ... it's all so blurry. Reviews have said it looks like a Gamecube game; my Gamecube was never this blurry. I found that console's graphics to be more than good enough, and still do the occasional time I fire it up. I was expecting minor steps forward in the graphics department, not a big slip backwards.

The more serious issue is the controls. They feel so bolted on and gimmicky. Wave your wii-mote about to initiate sword attacks. Except the result is no different at all to pressing a button. I find I'd rather be using a normal controller, save for when I do a spin attack. Shaking the nunchuk to get a spin attack is the only improvement I've found on the control scheme so far. Aiming projectiles via the wii-mote is not as easy as I'd like, probably because I have to waggle the remote about at arms length in front of the TV before it detects it to put the cursor on screen, a process which sometimes results in the cursor appearing instantly, others in taking precious seconds. The fly in the muddy ointment is that occasionally I find Link doing things I don’t want him to in battle and dying because of it. Like flying over an enemy’s head into an instant death cloud of poison. Meaning I had to repeat several minutes of play to get back to that point because the save/continue point system is still in the early 90's. And then he did it again. This is a far cry from the older 3D Zeldas, where I felt Link was so well under my control I only needed to think of doing something and it was done.

I'm not sold on the wii-mote speaker either; why is having tinny-sounding sword swooshes coming out of the wii-mote classed as better than having proper quality sword swooshes coming from the TV? The result is just odd and a bit tacky.

It all adds up. Ocarina of Time is my favourite game ever. Majora's Mask isn't far behind. I enjoyed Wind Waker, with the exception of the boring sailing, until it got to the awful fetch-quest near the end. I'm simply not getting the same feeling of awe and addiction with Twilight Princess. Everything I like about it is undermined by the blurriness, the controls, and having to stand to play it.


Wii Sports isn't my usual cup of tea; I don't like sports and I don't like sports games. But it came free, and it should be good to play with my boyfriend. It has five games: tennis, bowling, golf, baseball, boxing. Bowling and baseball are mind-numbingly boring. Golf is the least interesting game out of the lot to me, I haven't tried it yet (why bother with golf when there's Zelda?!).

Tennis is the one I should have liked; it's the one I was looking forward to trying. It should have been great, given the motion sensor controls. It isn't. A lot of my swings don't pick up, or trigger the wrong kind of move. Left side control is the biggest problem: I swing on my left and the character stubbornly swings on his right. Tennis is the one which gets all that talk about non-gamers picking up a wii-mote and playing happily in seconds. I haven't won a single game of tennis. I've scored 1 point. In 11 games. In the same time I've watched the ball bounce past my character as I swing the wii-mote futilely more times than I can count.


Not entirely related but still a factor in my end feeling: You can play gamecube games on the Wii. Excellent! I have an imported US gamecube, and there are some titles I never imported. I can play the PAL versions now. Theoretically - none of the shops near me have gamecube titles. Amazon.uk doesn't have the ones I want except as second hand extortionate rip offs. Nowhere has them. I'm talking first party Nintendo titles like Pikmin 2 here.

And another: All games on the virtual console for PAL territories are PAL versions. Huzzah - we got a crappier version of the game the first time around, and can now download a crappy version again, paying more for that 'privilege' than any other territory. There's no option to get a proper 60Hz version even if your TV supports it, and nearly all TVs in the UK now do. Most worrying of all this means that games which didn't reach PAL territories before likely won't come to the virtual console. So no Mario RPG et al for us.


:sigh: So in the end most of my problems really come back to one thing: the motion sensor controls. They don't work reliably, they don't work comfortably, and they feel gimmicky in one out of my two games.

I have tried moving the sensor bar from below the TV to above it, standing closer, standing further back, I've turned down sensitivity, I've turned up sensitivity, I've even tried telling it the sensor bar is below my TV when it is above it and vice versa in the hope that would help. Moving the bar above the TV made a slight improvement, but it also ensures I absolutely must stand to play.

Gah! I’ve got Zelda and I can’t play it because I’ve hurt my knee and can’t stand to use some gimmicky feeling controls I’d rather do without!