I Played the Wii Again, and You Didn’t (or Wii Hands-On)

I played with the Wii. Again. For most of you out there in internet land, that leaves me at 2 times playing the Wii… and you at none. But don’t get mad at my obvious superiority over you. I, Benny, am here to bless you with my hands-on impression goodness. Man do I rock hardcore. Seriously though, I got to play with almost-final Wii hardware at the Activision event and I couldn’t be more excited about the hardware itself.

I was able to get my grubby hands on the actual Wii console itself. I picked it up, opened up the flaps (even the mystery one), and generally tried to get a sense of what I’d be buying come November. There really isn’t anything but good news to report. The Wii console is small, but not ridiculously so. It’s nice and light… and feels just as solid as any other Nintendo console. All the flaps close with a very nice thunk, and the entire unit exudes Nintendo quality. The white, shiny surface of the Wii is attractive and didn’t seem to attract fingerprints at an alarming rate (and there were plenty of people grabbing at it). On a small side note, the Wii looks fairly nice on its side. In fact it looks even smaller.

There isn’t anything glamorous about the Gamecube ports up top. There are 4 controller ports and 2 memory card ports. If you don’t want them, you wouldn’t even know the flap was there. The front flap does indeed hold the fabled “SYNC” button and an SD card slot. The SYNC button is pressed in conjunction with the SYNC button on the Wiimote to pair them together. You only have to do this once, until you want your controller to connect to another Wii. There were two Wii (is the plural of Wii, Wii? It should be) in the same room, and they never experienced any interference from each other.

The ever elusive blue light was not on during gameplay, and I can only assume that the Wii will be like the Game Boy Micro in that the blue only comes on during start up. The only light coming from the Wii while it was on was a small green light next to the eject button. Around back, we’ve got all the ports you’re used to seeing: sensor bar, power cord, and A/V out. Unfortunately, Nintendo has abandoned a long loved tradition and changed the A/V plugs for the Wii. Your old Nintendo A/V connections will not work with the Wii. I’m sure the new ones have some special motion sensing quality to them that Nintendo hasn’t announced.

The power brick is really small (I’d say smaller than the GCN one) and was a light grey color. The Wii is also whisper quiet. I don’t even remember hearing a disc spinning sound (and the games were running on discs. I saw the CD-Rs myself!). The sensor bar is tiny. It was placed above the TV (on a small plastic stand), and I didn’t notice it after I initially saw it. I didn’t get to see any interface or anything like that. At one point, one of the games froze, and I was expecting to see the Wii interface on the restart. But alas, there was just developer-looking computer text. Color me sad.

The controllers were close to final units (if not final themselves). Again, they felt amazing. They were the perfect size and weight for what you do with them. Not one problem with the buttons or the d-pad; everything on the controller feels great. The speaker’s volume is loud enough to hear, but not loud enough to distract. It’s nothing mind-blowing, just a small addition to the controller.

I didn’t really get to test out how the Wiimote reacted to changing my distance to the sensor bar, but I can tell you that people were moving all around, and there weren’t any hardware related problems. The controllers were completely wireless, and 4 were running on each Wii. The best thing I can say about the controller is that I didn’t even notice it. It just kind of melted in my hands, and I never really thought about it while playing.

Basically, if you have any worries about the Wii hardware, don’t. The units that I played were fantastic in almost every way, and I don’t foresee any major issues come November. It really can’t come soon enough.

And that’s about it. If you have any Wii related hardware questions, please drop me a line and I’ll try to answer them as best a rebel could.