I was surprised to find that my wee sister has gone and bought herself a Nintendo Wii. I have to admit that I was fairly sceptical about the Wii to begin with. I actually, perhaps foolishly, advised her against buying one because many of the games seemed very gimmicky at first glance. Having finally played a few different games on the console though I’ve found it very intuitive, and the controls don’t seem all that gimmicky when they’re done correctly. I’m sure that there are quite a few poor games that have badly designed motion sensor based controls that feel shoehorned in to an otherwise standard console control scheme. The Nintendo games that I played on my sister’s machine, Mario Kart and Wii Sports specifically, seemed perfectly designed for the system.
I do still think that some of the available games are gimmicky, but i suspect that’s simply laziness on the part of the developers. It’s easier to throw out a new Wii-Fit-esque clone than it is to come up with something genuinely original. It’s the problem that plagues every form of modern entertainment so I can’t judge the Wii on that any more than I can judge the cinema. I am worried that when I passed a cursory glance at the latest Wii games available on play.com most of them were game versions of the standard post-Christmas celebrity fitness videos, but I’m going to assume that there are some nuggets of gold like Mario KArt buried under all that shite.