Wii Hardware Review

The Photo Channel is something of a first for Nintendo. This isn’t gaming. This has nothing to do with gaming; in fact, we’d call it multimedia entertainment. Which is strange, when Nintendo tell us Wii is “All about the games”. The Photo Channel then is Nintendo’s at-tempt to justify the console’s place at the heart of every living room. Everyone takes digital photos now and they tend to take them all the time. Annoying for those who hate the glare of the lens, but great fun to have a laugh at with everyone after a great night out or a fam-ily trip to the zoo (the latter probably being Nintendo’s preference). Shove in an SD card to the slot in the front (which still closes with an SD card inside, which is nice) and in under a second all your photographs will be found and ready to rock and or roll. You can scroll through them, rotate them, doodle on them, make puzzles out of them or view a slideshow of them. What’s even better is you can use MP3 files on your SD card as a soundtrack to your slideshows. The Photo Channel as a whole is so unlike Nintendo it is hard to believe this is on one of the company’s systems, but it is. What’s more, it works fantastically well and really adds another dimension to the technology as a ‘family’ console.

The Wii Message Board then is a further extension of the Wii as a bit of a social tool. You can leave message for anyone and everyone on the system or indeed anyone in the world if you have their Wii Code. Games like Wii Sports and Wii Play will leave you messages to let you know if you break records or any interesting information on your performances and each and every day you get a record of your playtime on the system, detailing to the min-ute precisely what you have been playing and how long you’ve been on your Wii all to-gether. It might be a little thing, it might be pointless, but you’ll find yourself checking it every day. There is something about seeing a new message that genuinely excites us. Tragic, isn’t it?

The Wii Settings Menu is stuffed full of loads of options to help your optimise and sort out just about every aspect of your Wii experience. You can manage your save files, sort out Internet settings, change the picture, the sound, adjust parental controls or if you really need to format the whole Wii system memory. It might not be terribly exciting but it is all very functional and will come in use from time to time when things need sorting out. In-deed, the whole Wii Channel system is a very cohesive and comprehensive piece of kit, and there is plenty of room for expansion in the future.

It is the controller though that most people are getting excited about, and rightly so. This is a fantastic innovation from Nintendo and one that even makes navigating through menus fun...somehow. It fits perfectly into both big and small and it is comfortable and ergonomic in design. In fact, it doesn’t really have any major flaws. The buttons are well placed, com-fortable to use and the motion sensitivity is excellent. We had far better results by placing the sensor bar directly below our TV as this seemed to pick up a far wider range of move-ments with a lot more accuracy. The sensor bar itself is just a very light, flimsy looking bit of plastic with sticky pads to secure it to surfaces, we kid you not, it is nothing more than that. In fact, if some footage is to be believed two well placed candles can do the same job as it.