Wii Have Fun!

Tiffany's sister was one of the countless lucky ones whose Santa was able to find a Wii this Christmas. It's much more fun the Magic Bullet. Nintendo's newest offering is amazingly revolutionary with the remote control wand in lieu of what I think of as a regular controller, and after just a few hours of practice I feel like I'm ready to give a major presentation complete with laser pointer.

I should say that my idea of a regular controller is one that is first and foremost tethered to the game console. Moreover, it has a directional pad and an A button and a B button, which is almost always used to jump. Since then there have been some pretty big upgrades. A C-button, but that fell out of favor when X and Y came along. The top L and R trigger buttons were added too, but I don't like using those, because it changes how I hold the controller, then there was the directional pad and the joystick and a trigger and an A, a B, and six C buttons for a while. Then there was a second joystick on the same controller along with a directional pad, which I still don't understand why. But this is something entirely different.

All of those were attached. There was a wire running from you to the game box to the TV. Plus, they were all the same basic idea, they were just getting more and more complicated, not unlike an old one bedroom house that grows room by room as the family inside grows until you wind up with this strange amalgamation of a house that belongs on the pages of Mother Goose, with kids running all over the place.

In fact, I had a friend with this theory that today's kids will possess a much more greater mental capacity as a direct result of all those extra buttons. Growing up using 18 buttons is definitely more complicated than using three that I started out on.

The Wii just scraps the whole idea and forces you to actually swing a bat or roll a ball or shake a soda can or punch your friend. I probably could get into the idea that it's not the same as actually swinging a bat or rolling a ball or punching your friend, but I won't because it's just too much fun! I love it.

I love it so much that I'm afraid I've played it too much. Like the first days of summer growing up, after spending hours upon hours, heading to bed with a sore thumb, the beginnings of a necessary callous, I am holding my arm and wincing in pain from the beginnings of tennis elbow and a sore shoulder, but am eager to return and start up a game.

In honor of my friend, I'm going to take a moment to wonder how the Wii will affect the growth of little minds. They will probably all be experts at giving major presentations with laser pointers.