So, over the Thanksgiving holiday I was able to pick up one of the new Nintendo Wii consoles. It has fancy new motion sensitive controllers, that Nintendo is betting is going to make it more entertaining (and accessible) for a broader audience to enjoy their game. So the games are all designed so that you have to move, or swing, or hammer, or shake or point the controller in order to play the game.
It was definitely pretty fun in action. I mean, my sister(!) was the first person to want to give it a go with me, and what a hoot. We played some baseball, which is neat, one person has to pitch, and the other bats… but you gotta make swinging and throwing motions to do it. It’s a hoot to get everyone all into it. She kicked my ass at baseball, but I took her down on the bowling lane. Next I need to have a dinner party where we can explore more of the party games. There’s a great game of red light/green light, where everyone has to swing the controllers back and forth to run down to the other end, but stop swinging before the guy turns around, you know like back in grade school.
I don’t know if their strategy is going to pay off, but for what I feel like console game systems are good for (getting people together in the same room to play games together) I think it’s great.