Wii Box of Tricks

By gum, Nintendo have cooked up a neat box of tricks in the Wii, which, I understand was the top Christmas present in Italy this year.

The Wii was quite easy to install, and the instruction manual is not all that necessary. Aside from the innovative system used to play games with its hi-tech motion sensor, hooking up to the www was pretty straightforward too.

Apparently for 500 points you can buy a Wii web browser and surf the web from your TV. The 500 points equate to about 5 Euros which does not sound too bad.

Then there are the interent updated weather and news channels which are rather good. The weather info with its 5 day forecast is great, the news, on the other hand, is a little bit sparse and will not have the likes of CNN, ABC or the BBC quivering in their boots, not yet anyway.

As for doing what the Wii is intended for, which is playing games, this is a novel experirience. The wireless controller is very cool, even if I'm a little worried that I might end up flailing my around too enthusiastically and ending up damaging something. Thank heavens for the tether and the rubbed case thingy which keeps the controller quite soft. However, if the tether snaps, then I just hope I don't end up embedding the controller in the TV screen! Our old fashioned CRT could possibly survive the impact, although I'm not too sure whether an LCD screen would resist such a collision. Hope I never have to find out!

All we need to do now is to demolish my son's bedroom wall so we will have enough space to do our Wii thing. Of course a 60 inch LCD TV would be nice, but then so would a house about 5 times the size. This Wii could turn out to have one or two more hidden costs...

Great fun though is the Wii life.