1) Kate and I went to a New Year's party at the home of a colleague in Math, whose kids got a Wii for Christmas. We spent a while playing with it, and it's way more interesting than any other gaming system I've seen in years.
2) Windows Vista sucks ass. Evidence: It is incapable of switching between users on my tablet without locking the entire system up in a way that requires a hard power off to reset. Kate set up a separate account for herself, so she wouldn't have to log me out of GMail and Bloglines to check her messages, but it is impossible to log in under one account, and switch to the other without turning the tablet off and back on. Which sort of defeats the entire purpose of having two separate user accounts on the machine.
3) Ummm... something about the Packers. Geez, that Brett Favre is old.
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We got a Wii for xmas too, and when the games are programmed to take good advantage of the controllers (such as the Wii Sports games) it is truly amazing.
RIght now there is a mix of crappy looking games that use the controllers well, and nice looking games that don't really take good advantage of the motion sensors at all. It looks like this Spring/Summer is when the system will really come into its own.
PS> My new year's fitness regimen is centered around Wii Bioxing + wrist weights. Laugh if you will, but it's the most fun I've ever had while breaking a sweat.
We played or saw people play tennis, bowling, and golf.
The tennis appeared to be very frustrating because you had to swing much earlier than seemed sensible. Ditto the golf, at least for the actual golfer, though its interface seemed more sensible to me (I didn't play).
I bowled a 189, so thought that game was great. =>
Wii is cool.
Mind you, I'm one of those who enjoys a good game of Halo on the Xbox. But the Wii is something that the Xbox and PS3 are not: innovative. Yeah, Microsoft and Sony use the I-word a lot because they have faster graphics and high definition and bigger hard drives and etc. But they're just the natural evolutionary changes from their previous generation consoles. The Wii really is doing some things differently, and it's paying off. Of course, many of the wonks were *very* dubious of the Wii before it came out... probably for the same reasons that most Hollywood studios hesitate to fund something that really is different.
Re: Vista, I read a humorous review of Microsoft's upgrade to Vista (Windows XP) which, surprisingly for Microsoft, really was an ideal updgrade, better and more stable in every way than its predecessor (Vista)....
I was skeptical of the all-ages marketing materials Nintendo puts out until I actually saw old people playing wii bowling at the community space in a retirement community recently. It was really fascinating to watch them teach each other to play something completely new and novel (to them).
Favre is mentally young. He didn't use his brain for the past 4-5 seasons, just run around, heave, and think "this will be completed cause Madden says I'm havin fun out there!"
Vista's ability to boot into the last working version of the system when an update fails miserably is nice. Of course, if updates didn't fail miserably, I wouldn't know about the feature.
To Dr. Dave, I offer that both Zelda and Metroid 3 are beautiful games with excellent (IMO) Wiimote control implementations. Particularly Metroid, on both counts.
The Wii was fun for about 30 minutes, at which point the novelty started to wear off.
But then, I find games to be enjoyable, so waving the wiimote around was mostly just a distraction.