Frii Time

Not a ton of time for blogging tonight, due to the little birthday presentTechnically not until next Monday. I bought for myself: a Wii with some accessories and a couple of games.

This is the first console I’ve ever owned. From childhood, when I visited friends to play Atari or Intellivision (I did eventually get a Vic 20, which was most emphatically not a console–although it may have been the start of my interest in software), through all the various Nintendo and Sony systems (none of which I owned, or even played for more than a lifetime total of about 20 minutes) that were thick on the ground during my university years and onwards, I’ve always abstained. Partly this is because the games that interested me tended to be PC games–I liked the RPGs, the strategy games, and the complex simulations, all of which were (and I think still are) better on the PC platform with their more complex input mechanisms. Partly this is because I always hated the controllers for console games.

So why the change now?

There are a number of reasons, but the big ones are:

1. I like the controller(s)–it can hardly be news at this point that these things are cool
2. I don’t really have time for the kinds of games I’ve always preferred these days, so games that can be played in shorter bursts, with less investment are nice right now.
3. Several Wii games might be of interest to Trish, and some of those might overlap with the ones that interest me.
4. Wii seems like a family-friendly platform. It should be fun to play some of this stuff with Sarah. I suspect she could play a bunch of the stuff from WiiPlay right now, and I’ll introduce more as it seems appopriate.
5. Having something that can be played by multiple players, and that lives in the living room rather than on a workstation in my office, seems more sociable, both for family gaming, and for visitors.

Or, maybe it’s a really lame mid-life crisis. Heh.

Anyway, if you’ve got one of these things, and I know you (either in person, or online), feel free to drop me an email (or comment) with your Wii number in it, so we can setup the network connection. Oh, and I am accepting recommendations for games I would dig, or that might appeal to my wife or child.

So far the full list of what we’ve got (in addition to the default WiiSports) is: WiiPlay, Marble ManiaYeah, I read the review, but I always loved those games, from the days of Marble Madness on the Commodore 64 through to Ballance on the PC. And I got it for $15., and Resident Evil 4 (Sarah will not be playing this).