A Wii night

So Arcade Fire cancelled because of Win Butler getting a sinus infection and losing his voice, which was a total bummer!!


Anyway, deciding to make the best of it anyway, me and some of the guys I was gonna go with stayed at my place and drank beer and played the all magnificent amazing Nintendo Wii. This was my first time with this excellent piece of machinery, and I had to surrender to it totally. It was the most hilarious experience waving, jumping, poking, scratching, squatting around on the floor with the wii remote and nunchuk.

For those of you who don't know the Wii, it's the new console from Nintendo, who instead of hopping on the graphical performance race with Xbox 360 and PS3, have decided to instead totally innovate the way games are played. When you are playing the Wii, you hold the wireless remote in your hand, the console then senses how you move the remote through bluetooth technology. So for example in a tennis game, you will actually do the movements (simplified of course) that is necessary to perform the actions: serving, hitting the ball etc. In a game where you fight with swords, the wii remote becomes the sword's handle, that you then move to strike and parry and so forth. Also there's a tiny speaker in the wii remote that will make appropiate sounds, this might be the swosh of a tennis racket, or the clanger of steel on steel. This makes for some very immersive games, where the abstraction of using for example a standard console controller to move a sword is very much reduced.


We mostly played a game called Warioware: Smooth Moves. Which is basically a series of micro-games, that is, a string of tiny games only lasting a few seconds. Examples are: clipping a fingernail, shaving a sheep, lifting a phone when it rings, tracing a drawing, inserting prostetic teeth in a mouth, putting on a ring on a finger etc. etc. etc. All done through movements with the remote. You only have seconds to register what is going on, as each game is timed, and then doing the appropiate movement with the remote, you'r only clues will be the way to hold the remote (normal, like a pencil, wear as a mohawk, use as a trunk etc.) and a single word in imperative (cut! Shave! Answer! Draw! Insert! etc.)
This makes for some very frantic, hilarious gameplay. I really don't think I've laughed as much while playing a video game.


We also played good old Guitar Hero, a classic.

A great sunday evening indeed, in spite of the cancellation.