Having Fun With Nintendo’s Wii Console
Video games as a hobby are usually played in teenage bedrooms. You buy them a games console when they’re ten and then they disappear for hours at a time, emerging infrequently to load up on snacks and fizzy drinks.
However, that all changed when the Nintendo Wii console was released. It soon became obvious that the Wii was a console better suited to the living room than the bedroom. There are a number of reasons for this.
First of all, the Wii’s motion sensitive controller (the wii-mote) meant that the manner in which games were played was much more intuitive. Games were much simpler to get the hang of, no need to remember that button X is to punch, button Y lets you breathe fire and button Z freezes time. In fact, Wii games are so easy to play that even adults can learn them in a matter of minutes.
Also, as a result of the physical element of Wii games, there’s a little exercise involved. Not only the famous Wii Fit – but almost all Wii games require some degree of jumping around, much more so than the typical games found on other consoles. That requires some space to move around in.
For some reason, which is difficult to quantify precisely, Wii games and the Wii console seem to have a more social element than has been seen up to now with other PC or console games. You can “play the computer” if you want of course, but Wii games tend to be much more fun as part of a group of gamers.
Maybe it’s the fact that you have to dance around, wave your arms about and generally make yourself look a bit silly at times. Whatever it is, the Wii is very definitely a group activity.
As cheesy as it sounds, the Wii is genuinely great fun for kids of all ages. Wii games can be a social event, they can help you to exercise and lose weight and they are a lot of fun. Most important of all, the Wii has taken video games out of teenager’s bedrooms and planted them fairly and squarely in the family living room.
As a matter of fact, this might go some way to explaining the success when Nintendo recently “went to the dark side” and launched a black Wii console in Europe just before Christmas. It proved to be very popular with customers – possibly because the black colour matched the other devices in their living rooms. At this time, the black Nintendo Wii console has not been launched in the USA.
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