"Another great console, but it wasn't as good as I thought it would be."

Nintendo have done it AGAIN. If it wasn't for the NES, then maybe home consoles wouldn't exist any more. Nintendo stormed the world with the NES, and thus made another console, the SNES. Although the NES didn't really have much competition, the SNES did, but still came out as victor. When the N64 came out though, Playstation came, and pretty much beat the N64 to bits. Then came Playstation 2, and Dreamcast, so Nintendo rushed out their next console, the Gamecube. Again, this got beaten by the Playstation 2 and Xbox, when that joined. Then the Revolution was announced, and soon after, a remote for a controller, and a new name, Wii. My friend lost faith in them, but I kept with them. Then the censors where announced, and my friend came back. Now its past December the 8th, and I have my Wii. The Wii truly is the best of the 3 next gen consoles (it would be fair to say current gen now though).

So then, the first time the box is opened, you will realise, it really is that small. Compared to the PS3 and Xbox 360, this machine is smaller, and better looking. Also, it makes less sound, the 360 is like a plane taking off, but I haven't heard the PS3 whilst its on. The Wii doesn't really get hot either. You can have it on all day, and its barely as hot as a radiator just turned on. There are 3 buttons on the front, POWER, Reset and Eject. The disc drive is on the front too, its a cool hole, you place the disc in front of it and it sucks it up. Its more useful then a disc drive, because they can break if your not careful. There is also a small hole behind a small door for SD cards, which acts as memory cards, or you just view and edit your photos on the Photo channel. Also, the controllers are wireless, so there aren't any ports on the front. At the top, beneath a little door, is 4 gamecube controller ports, and 2 memory card ports, for your gamecube stuff, obviously. The machine is pretty good looking, small, quiet, and has a minimal amount of ports and stuff. Which is good.

The interface is pretty simple. Once its all plugged in, and your sensor bar is set up right, you just point the remote toward it, and a hand will appear on screen. Yes, its like Red Steel, twist your arm around and the hand will turn upside down and whatever. At first, your aim will be pretty bad, it took me ages to enter all the settings, but later on, your hand will have a firmer grip and will be more steady, sooner or later, you will be able to add friend codes and the likes faster than your DS (well, thats a possibility). On the main menu, you have many little boxes which are called channels. Currently there are Disc channel. This lets you play your Wii and gamecube games. Also, there is the Mii channel. Creating a Mii is very fun, and its almost impossible to recreate your self, but there are a lot of good options and choices and such, so your most likely to make some comedic character or something. After this is the photo channel, which I haven't actually used, so I don't really know much. I know you can view your photos and such, and im not sure, but I think you can edit them. After this is the Virtual Console games shop, which I haven't used (I don't have broadband). This basically lets you spend your Wii points on old NES, SNES, N64, Turbogfx 64 and Mega Drive games. Only a select few are available, but more will come. To me though, they're slightly over priced. After that is the weather forecast channel, so you can see the weather around the globe, and there is the news channel. The latter two channels are currently closed, but these should be open by January next year. Again, those require broadband too. Soon, there will be an internet browsing provided by Opera, which will be free for a while at first. The interface is easy, you can see your memory space and such, and your memory cards.

The machine however, isn't that powerful. It doesn't have as much RAM as an Xbox 360 or PS3, the graphics are only slightly better than an Xbox, and some games have bad frame rates (im looking at Red Steel here). BUT that doesn't entirely matter. As long as the game is made well, the hardware of the Wii shouldn't matter too much. The best graphics thus far are from Zelda, but I am sure they can get better. Playing my Wii on a HDTV, I have to say, the graphics do look impressive, but without a HDTV cable out yet, they should look even better soon. With the sound, again, this is up to the game. Now the Wii has more storage on their discs, all games should have voice acting and a full orchestra for the music, so the quality of the music is good for the Wii, as long as the game allows the music to be good. Although the graphics aren't as good as other consoles currently, the sound is.

So then, what about the game library? Well, quite a lot of them, are admittedly, pretty bad. Zelda isn't as good as every one thought, Red Steel was just WAAAAAY too over hyped, Excite Truck is rubbish (unlike Excite Bike), and Far Cry is pretty bad too. It seems the only game that lived up to what every one thought it would be like, was Super Monkey Ball. We still have some more games to go yet, Super Smash Bros Brawl, Super Mario Galaxy. There will most probably be a Mario Kart, and another set of Mario sports games too. Metroid Prime 3 is on its way, and then there will be more great games that probably aren't being made yet. So what about the Virtual Console? Well, the current selection is good, but not as good as I thought. With only Super Mario 64 available for N64 games currently, I am disappointed. Still, some classics for the SNES are there, Super Castlevania IV, F-Zero, and then there are some good NES games too. The Turbo games are pretty good, and I haven't really seen much for the Mega Drive. Next, I would have a paragraph with the online, but currently, I cannot connect my Wii up, some error or something. So I cannot rate the online functions of the Wii.

Overall, the Wii is a great come back from Nintendo. I thought it would be much better, but thats mainly because of the launch game library. Admittedly, the games aren't always good at launch, and we got a fair amount, but some games, like Red Steel, could of gotten more work. Nintendo have a lot of work to make the Wii even better, but im sure they will cook some amazing games up in the future, along with third-party developers. But if the game library stays like it is now, then that will be a problem for Nintendo. But I suspect games like Super Smash Bros (yeah, I have said that game a lot of times in this review) and Super Mario Galaxy should be good. A good launch, with loads of units being sold, this is most probably Nintendos best launch yet!

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 01/03/07