no maps for this territory · 2006-12-15 21:37

Last Friday was Wii-day in Europe – I pre-ordered my Wii at the end of September; the shop I went to in Helsinki had about 50, and I was about halfway down the list. They didn’t receive any games or accessories, seems Finland got a raw deal, as always. I managed to pick up an extra wiimote, Zelda and Wii Play (with a free wiimote) at other stores in Helsinki, with Rayman Raving Rabbids this week, but nunchucks and video cables are like gold dust.

I’ve never ever pre-ordered a games console before. In fact, I’ve never bought a games console in the first two years of its release before. So why Wii? Tangible interaction. Ludic rather than narratologist. Nintendo. Replaces my Gamecube (anyone want a gamecube without controllers?). I don’t care about polygons and video capabilities (although, the gamecube always had rather nice special effects, shown really nicely in Wii Tennis).

Wii is better than I ever imagined.

There are many weird features that have come to light in the last 6 months, all of which sounded slightly naff or useless. Together, that make perfect sense.

First, speakers in each controller. It sounded bonkers when first announced, but it works beautifully. System wide sound comes from the tv at the front, individual sounds come from your controller. In Wii Tennis, your controller sounds like a racket hitting a ball. In Boxing, you get the punches, plus your count if you get knocked out. It’s meaningful surround sound.

Virtual Console is great, works as advertised. Playing Sonic The Hedgehog on the Wii is kinda crazy. Some games require either the Wii Classic Controller, or Gamecube controllers (both wired, I think). Some payback on the Gamecube investment.

The Wii itself is tiny and unobtrusive. It happily hides amongst the home electronic menagerie – something that the friendly but garish Gamecube never did. The sensor bar is small and unbranded, and craftily is not white like the rest of the system. It’s silver and black, meaning it fits in with most TVs.

The wiimote has been pretty well designed. The power button switches the console on or off, which is very nice. The plastic is a bit slippy, and the strap is most definitely required (Wii Play needs far smaller movements than Wii Sports). It’s nice that there aren’t many buttons on the remote, but the home button, whilst slightly recessed, is annoyingly close to the A button, leading some people to press it often, halting the game for everyone. The nunchuck is attached with a cable to the Wiimote, which works in most situations, but I got caught up in the cable in Boxing. The cable’s a bit short for my arm length.

Miis. I was very unsure about the Mii idea, but the Mii creation tool is really quite fun (although too limited on colours). Miis however work really well in a game situation – you can quickly and easily find yourself on screen, which is very important in 4 player games.

Memory everywhere. There’s quite a large memory on the Wii for Miis, downloaded games, new channels, and saved games. Not needing to buy or remember memory cards is awesome. There’s also memory in the wiimotes, and you can copy miis over to the wiimote, so you can take your player and play on other Wiis really easily. Very very nice.

Haptic feedback. Similar to WarioWare Twisted, the haptic slap really does help selection of things on screen.

Wiimail is implemented a bit strangely (far too many keypresses to control the mail). However, you can set up email addresses as well as other Wiis to send and receive mail. So, in effect, each Wii gets its own email address. However, you need to set up email addresses to receive from on the Wii first, which is a bit annoying. Whilst the default on-screen keyboard is qwerty, you can also switch to ITU (i.e. a mobile phone keypad). An interesting sign of youth practices spreading.

Internet integration is minimal other than wiimail, but the Forecast Channel comes in a few weeks, News Channel in January, and hopefully the Internet browser soon. The channel system means that it can only get better.

I took my Wii into work, and I think we had about 30 people try it out during the day. It’s fun to play and fun to watch people play. About 10 people hadn’t really heard of the Wii (some had never played a computer game before), but wanted to buy one straight away after using it… it’s a real pity that there’s such a shortage before Christmas. One try and people are hooked, and there’s tremendous advocacy once experienced as well.

As an experience designer, the most interesting thing about Wii is breaking gameplay standards. Traditional gamers have difficulty with the idea that you don’t need to press any buttons. They build myths around the moves (“you need to release the trigger when serving”, “press A to hit the ball”) that aren’t true. Most games in Wii Sports and Wii Play require minimal use of any buttons. To paraphrase a gamer friend – all the experience in playing games for the last 20 years is for nothing. It’s basically every non-standard controller arcade game – House of the Dead, air hockey, skeeball, Samba De Amigo, Whack-A-Mole. Only the DDR games aren’t really represented at the moment, but I assume that will change.

The advertising for the games features people. Which sounds stupid, but if you think about it, it’s pretty groundbreaking. There’s normally a screenshot and a picture of people side by side.

The game manuals are also interesting (and only in Swedish and Finnish, so I’m guessing a bit). Nintendo have had to come up with their own design language for communicating how to play. You can’t just recite key combos like in previous manuals. We looked at this a bit when designing NFC – how to best represent real physical movements. The most interesting thing we found was Laban Notation for dance, but it’s hideously complicated. It will be interesting to see what emerges, both in terms of the interactions designed and the ways of explaining them.

Wii is hard work. I’ve been a bit stiff – Suffering from Wii Shoulder and Wii Elbow. This can only be a good thing for gamers. Wii Sports is very biased to your dominant hand, but Rayman Rabbids uses both at different time for different things, often with your opposite hand doing the manual work (say pumping carrot juice) whilst the dominant hand does the precision pointing.

I’m wondering what tweaks and tips people come up with for games. I’ve found holding the controller in a slightly different position for bowling counteracts some spin.

There are a few downsides to Wii. Firstly, the game selection isn’t great at the moment. Wii Sports is only really interesting with other people, or for very quick 5 minute games. It remains to be seen actually how much you can learn and get better at it. Wii Play is pretty small for a game (but the mini games are good fun). Raving Rabbids is interesting, in that it’s basically the Crystal Maze boiled down into your living room. There’s 13 levels, each with skill, timing, power and accuracy games, plus a boss level, normally consisting of a rails shooter. I find I can play a few levels at a time, before getting tired/bored.

The other downside is the lack of personalisation of the Wiimotes. These games are social, so there are many situations where the Wiimotes get taken to another console – and of course with the transferable Miis, they’re designed for that. But all of them look the same, and you want to keep your remote with your Miis on them. They’re pretty tightly designed – there’s no space on the controller where personalisation can really be applied, other than maybe very flat stickers. There’s definitely a market for different straps here. There’s an interesting slot at the bottom of the Wiimote, which implies it will slot and click into other things.

It’s definitely worth checking out the interviews with many of the people who worked on the Wii. A lot of the design thoughts and drivers are not obvious, and build on one another to make the system complete.

photos by 1541, delta_avi_delta, arabella

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