Wii-kend

Went to UW Bothell yesterday to work on some posters for Delta Epsilon Chi, and then proceeded to watch the first half of the Apple Cup. Good turnout, although the crowd was a bit subdued. At halftime, I had my wife drop me off at the Game Crazy in Redmond so that I could meet up with Andru and get in line for the Wii. That was a 6PM.

Game Crazy (Hollywood Video) was pretty good to us, always coming by to take drink and snack orders, I mean, why wouldn't they want to take our money? Nintendo was there, tossing out tons of swag. I got a black Nintendo polo that says "PLAYER" on the back of the next, which is pretty sweet. I've also got a cubic assload of silicone Nintendo "PLAYER" bracelets. Andru and I were about 60th in line, but it was still 2AM before we managed to get our Wiis and get out of the store. Did find out that the Huskies managed to beat WSU, so it was a very good night.

Got the Wii home, set it up, although I had to really hack some things together since my entire AV setup is going through S-Video and there's no Wii S-Video cable yet. Setup was flawless, and it immediately grabbed a couple of network updates. Popped in Wii Sports and played a game of Bowling and a game of Boxing before we headed to bed.

All day today, I've been playing The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. The game is absolutely phenomenal ... not perfect, but incredibly damn good. I don't know if I'd call it better than Ocarina of Time just yet, but it's very close. I'm definitely feeling more drawn into the story at this point.

I played a brief round of Super Monkey Ball just to get a feel for the controls, and it's pretty awesome too. Unlike the GameCube game, there are 50 minigames and they all appear to be available from the get-go ... no earning points in story mode to unlock them. They sort of had to do that, since there are so many other competing games in the "mini game" space on Wii at launch.

It'll be very interesting to see how Wii does in the months ahead. Will the unique controller be a gimmick, or will it be embraced by the development community. Will Wii live up to its potential, or will it suffer a fate similar to the GameCube? Most importantly, will there ever be anything that plugs into the USB ports?