I had a chance to play the Wii some this week while in Las Vegas on a team-building exercise with eight other Iron Realms staff members. Naturally, since we’re video game developers we had to bring a couple of systems with us to play in the suite we typically get to serve as a base of operations. I brought a huge suitcase so that I could stuff a PS2 and a couple of Guitar Hero guitars in there, and someone else brought the Wii, which I’d never used.

We had:

  • Wii Sports
  • WarioWare Smooth Moves
  • Rayman Raving Rabids
  • Zelda

Most of the Wii time was spent on Wii Sports, with some betting taking place over the bowling (50 cents/point). Bowling was also my favorite of the five Wii Sports games though I felt that rolling a perfectly straight ball was excessively easy. Rayman was really cute, while WarioWare made me physically angry. I have rarely played a game I hated so much. For those who haven’t played it, it’s an endless series of charmless micro-games that take 1-5 seconds to play with incoherent “story” sequences in between that you can’t skip through. We never did play Zelda as we all would have wanted to engage with it for hours and it wasn’t the appropriate venue for that.

Unfortunately, I came away from my first Wii experience with a diminished desire to have one, though that could just be the selection of games (Wii Sports plays more like a demo than a completed game) we had. Of course, I’ll still be getting one as soon as I can walk into a store and purchase one without having to search around and I’m sure I’ll fire it up when friends are over since the controller makes for a pretty accessible experience but I think I’m likely to fall into the “Wii60″ category of gamer: Someone with a 360 for a main console and a Wii because it’s inexpensive and fun for friends who don’t otherwise game much.

I guess fundamentally I’m not excited about waving the controller around to play video games most of the time. The lack of positional detection also contributes to my lack of excitement. If the Wii could detect the controller’s position rather than merely acceleration and where it’s “pointing” I think I could be downright addicted to experiences like a boxing game or a tennis game or, of course, a sword/lightsabre fighting game. Without being able to detect the controller’s position though, the simulation suffers greatly in those types of applications. Boxing in Wii Sports felt like the equivalent of button-mashing to me, for instance, since the control was so imprecise.

What I want from the Wii (and what I’m not going to get most of the time I guess) is the same kind of experience that Guitar Hero gives. I want the hardware interface to simulate either the feeling of actually doing that or the idealized version of what it feels like to actually do that (I wouldn’t be interested in a ‘feature’ for Guitar Hero that involved finger bleeding from playing too long, for instance). Bowling came very close because the range and type of motions involved in bowling are very limited and defined while something with a much wider range of motions, like Tennis, falls down for me.

One thing I am quite looking forward to is a great driving game on the Wii. I like the idea of holding the controller as if it was the diameter of a steering wheel and controlling something like Burnout that way.