Nintendo Wii: first impressions

NOTE: the following is translated and adapted from a post of mine on the Nintendo DS - Portugal forum.

I have it at home, since yesterday.

I’ve been playing with it for several hours, now. Unfortunately, my brother (who is the one who bought it for me; I wasn’t in the country on release day) was only able to buy the basic package: the console itself, Wii Sports, one wiimote and one nunchuk.

I haven’t been able to explore Wii Sports thoroughly, as my TV is in my bedroom, and the bed is in the way. :| I’m going to move the TV to the living room today or tomorrow, hopefully. I’ve won a couple of tennis games (which is much more fun than you’d imagine), but the “real thing” will be when I can play with more room, and with more people (which will require more wiimotes, and they’re completely sold out right now).

Besides disk-based games, the Wii supports several channels, and can go online. Connecting it to the Internet was extremely easy; there were no compatibility problems with my Linksys WRK54G router, which I already use for the Nintendo DS. The wireless range seems to be better than that of the DS, and it now supports WPA encryption (which I’m not using, though, because of the DS - only WEP there). As soon as you go online, the console updates its firmware, which takes a little while, but no effort at all.

News and weather channels are available on the channel selection screen, but they’re not working yet; according to Wikipedia, they’ll be up and running either this month, or in January. Same thing about the Opera browser, whose release date is apparently December 23.

One of the most interesting channels is, of course, the Virtual Console. Apparently, new games will be released every friday. I’ve already bought a few: Donkey Kong (NES) due to nostalgia (even though it’s a relatively poor version, quite inferior to the original arcade), F-Zero (SNES), Super Mario 64 (N64), Donkey Kong Country (SNES), Sonic the Hedgehog (Mega Drive), Super Star Soldier (PC Engine) and Dungeon Explorer (PC Engine). A special note about Mario 64: I never had an N64, and, though I had already played the game using emulators, and later on the DS, I had never played it using an analog controller (in this case, a GameCube one) until yesterday. And the game really needs one; it’s like I was playing a different game! Moves and tricks that I had to struggle with on the DS come up absolutely naturally here. The N64 version doesn’t include the DS extras (3 new characters, more stars, better graphics), but this game really requires an analog stick…

A couple of PC Engine games support 5 players at a time. Dungeon Explorer is a more complex Gauntlet clone, and Bomberman 93 probably needs no introduction. Since the Wii can only support 4 wiimotes or classic controllers at a time, and up to 4 GameCube controllers, you need to use a combination of both. I have 4 GC controllers, so I will, hopefully, be able to play 5-player Dungeon Explorer after the next lunch here. :)

One warning: some (not all) NES, SNES and Mega Drive games (not PC Engine, oddly enough) weren’t, originally, properly converted from NTSC (60 Hz) to PAL (50 Hz); they had black borders on the screen, and were about 13% slower than the original versions. Since they’re perfectly emulated here, and the European Wii uses emulated PAL versions, the problem persists. If you’ve played the original versions and were OK with them, you won’t see a difference here, but it’s a pity that Nintendo didn’t do the extra work of fixing this problem… after all, the Wii supports 60 Hz PAL, unlike the original consoles.

And that’s it for now. When they’re available again, I hope to buy Wii Play (which includes an extra wiimote), a second nunchuk, and a couple of classic controllers. As for games, I want Zelda, Red Steel, DBZ: Tenkaichi 2 and Call of Duty 3. It’s likely that I’ll only be able to get most of those next year, though…

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5 Responses to “Nintendo Wii: first impressions”


  1. 1 Rui Moura

    Oh god, you are so lucky. I’m a big fan of Donkey Kong and i would love to play it on Wii.
    And when you get Zelda and COD3 you won’t need anything else :)

    Ps: is it easy to play the old games with the given controllers?

  2. 2 Pedro Timóteo

    Well, the best thing would be a classic controller (CC), but I don’t have one yet. So I can use either the wiimote (held horizontally, using the D-pad) or the GameCube controller. Games with more buttons can’t be played on the wiimote (and they say so), so it’s either the CC or the GC controller.

    For NES, Mega Drive and PC Engine games, I prefer the wiimote’s excellent D-pad. SNES and N64 games need the GC controller, so there’s no choice right now, until I get a CC. The GC controller is perfect for N64 games, but the choice of buttons for some SNES games isn’t perfect; DK Country, for instance, uses the (big) A button for something you don’t do very often, and the (much less accessible) Y button for something you do all the time.

    BTW: I’m a bit regretful of buying the NES Donkey Kong. Sure, it’s cheap, but, still… the NES version lacks one stage, and the cut scenes, from the arcade version, which is also faster and more responsive. It was one of the NES’s first games, and it shows. I suggest you stick to MAME for this one. :)

  3. 3 Ricardo

    What? You didn’t get Super Mario Bros.??? Shame on you! ;)

  4. 4 Pedro Timóteo

    [quote comment="12519"]What? You didn’t get Super Mario Bros.??? Shame on you! ;)[/quote]

    Not available yet in Europe (or in the US), only in Japan. Look here and here.

  5. 5 Nick

    Wow, looking back on this post from a year ago the wii has really come a long way. From being somewhat of a joke to the dominating system.

  1. 1 TheTutorial.info

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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Portugal