Nintendo Wii First Impressions

Connectivity

For the GameCube, Nintendo decided to stay mostly out of the Internet business and only offered a dial-up or broadband adapter that was all but completely ignored by third party publishers. Nintendo is making a little headway into the Internet age that all the rest of us have known for years. Even now, however, Nintendo hasn’t gone far enough. Indeed several of the promised Internet features like the weather and news downloads and the Opera web browser, are not a part of the Wii launch (they are supposedly coming in the next few weeks). Right now the only major Internet feature that is working is the Virtual Console store which will allow people to purchase, download and play older Nintendo games. At the time of this writing only a few games from Nintendo are available (such as Mario Brothers, Super Mario 64 and Donkey Kong) along with a couple of Sega games (Altered Beast and Sonic The Hedgehog) and on Tuesday the first Hudson-TurboGrafx 16 titles showed up (Bomberman 93 and Bonk’s Adventure). It’s important to know that these games are straight ports and not “enhanced” with new graphics, gameplay content or things like leaderboards like Microsoft’s Xbox Live Arcade. Like Arcade, the Virtual Console uses a points system, but unlike Microsoft’s it’s a little easier to follow. $10 gets you 1000 points (that amount gets you 800 points on the Xbox Live Arcade scale). The games themselves range from 500 to 1,000 points (only Super Mario 64 is currently at the highest price). You can buy points online via the Wii and a credit card or buy a Wii point card at a retail store.

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Internet connectivity is handled via the Wii’s included WiFi connection (again kudos to Nintendo and Sony for putting WiFi in their new consoles; we are still not sure why Microsoft didn’t offer imbedded WiFi in the Xbox 360). Most people who have a WiFi connection will likely go for the auto-assign feature but people who want to get down and dirty will be able to configure their WiFi connection manually with a number of options. In the few hours since we got the Wii we have had a little more trouble establishing an Internet connection than we have had when we first got our Xbox 360 and the PS3. We have had trouble maintaining a connection with several drop-offs. Furthermore, Nintendo made us download two updates before we could even go to the Virtual Console store; they took a long time to download and install (the better part of an hour in both cases). Hopefully Nintendo will be able to speed things up and improve their Internet service as time goes on.

The two biggest flaws in the Wii in terms of hardware are the lack of HDTV resolution (component cables will only get you up to 480p) and the lack of Internet multiplayer features out of the box for the launch. Nintendo has said they intend to have Internet multiplayer games for sometime in 2007 (and although not officially confirmed it’s nearly certain that one of them will be Metroid Prime 3) but launching multiplayer features late when Microsoft and Sony have these features ready to go now is a serious misstep. Nintendo likes to pride itself on its rabid fans but I bet these fans would appreciate the opportunity for better communication and better playing with online multiplayer. Hopefully Nintendo fans won’t have to wait too long but if Nintend can’t even offer a web browser for its launch we think we might have to wait up to a year before Nintendo brings on the multiplayer online games for the Wii in the states.

So far we have played around with the menu and played a bunch of Wii Sports, but will the big games help the Wii overcome some of its flaws? We will have our full review of the Wii (as well as the PS3) in the near future.