After a few internships and game conferences, I actually know the names and faces of a few people behind some great games. I first heard about MySims at GDC when I met a programmer who worked on it. Then, in the fall, I took a game design class with Robin Hunicke, who was the lead designer. I respect the work of both these people, so I wanted to see what this game was all about.

I have to admit that I am new to the Sims series (unless you count Sim City). However, I do understand that certain aspects of MySims are Sims conventions, such as the gibberish voice-overs. Also, I don't exactly fall into the younger, more casual demographic for MySims, so I did my best to review it accurately given the intended audience. Please note that all comments are based on the Wii version, as opposed to the DS version.

MySims is one of the happiest games I've ever played. All the avatars seemed very excited and hopeful. My own avatar was adorable and skipped around joyfully wherever she went. The entire art style reflects this happy, friendly theme. MySims managed to make everything cute and adorable, from metal detectors to loading screens. This seemed to enhance the game in almost every way. I only had an issue with the cutesy animations when I was trying to point at small features on the customization screen, and my avatar was so excited that she kept bopping around. So instead of changing her eye shape, I changed her hair. Or her mouth, depending on how she was dancing. Overall, it was a rather minor annoyance.

The entire game seems to give players plenty to do and guide them to their goals. For example, when I left my avatar idle while taking a cell phone call (in the real world), a pop-up appeared to help guide me towards my next task. If I were confused, this notice could be quite helpful. The game appears to be set up so players never feel lost and alone in the world.

Yet players don't have to do exactly what they are told at any given moment. About half an hour into the game, I was given a whole bunch of blueprints for items that I could build. By then, I had also learned how to build and remodel houses, prospect (with my trusty metal detector), and plant trees. Resources seemed abundant for those who seek them out. Also, activities are not limited to structured quests or events. I was happy to discover many ways that I could interact with the world around me, from snoozing on a bench to splashing in a fountain (and giggling, naturally).

I think that MySims is generally a decent game, with a careful attention to detail. It seems to be very friendly and well-suited to those who like to explore and build. If I were younger, I think I'd really enjoy it. I'm curious to see what my cousins think, and I'm looking forward to sharing it with them soon.  

Great graphics in a game always leave me in awe. I will often decide that I want to play a game based on a pretty screenshot. I’ll usually check the reviews first, but the aesthetics of a game are really important to me. If it’s not a beautiful world for me to escape to, I generally don’t want to be there.

I became intrigued with the Wii sequel to NiGHTS after seeing some pretty publicity screenshots. It was released last December and got mediocre reviews, so I hesitated before buying it. I recently had the opportunity to play it at a friend’s house, so I made sure to check it out.

NiGHTS was definitely pretty, but I had some serious issues with it. From the beginning, it felt very childish. The little boy had a ridiculous voice, and the children tended to talk in long, drawn-out dialog. I felt that the inclusion of children seemed somewhat forced. Although I realize that it was an essential part of the plot, the idea of putting real children in a fantasy world reminded me of movies I used to watch as a child where they put live actors in cartoons. Very few movies seem to use that concept with any degree of success.

The odd plot already left me skeptical, and I kept finding more to criticize. The children soon met up with Nights, a jester-like nightmaren. My friend had to repeatedly insist that Nights was a guy, as I was convinced by his slender body and high voice that he was a girl. I understand that this may be more acceptable in Japan, but I was left feeling as if I had to repeatedly suspend my disbelief for this game. NiGHTS was in an odd place between fantasy and reality, and I had a hard time accepting this strange genre.

When got past the intro to the actual gameplay, I was shocked by the difficulty of this lovely game that was seemingly geared towards children. While the original Sega Saturn version had used a joystick with full 360-degree control, the Wiimote nunchuck and other Wii-compatible controllers do not allow for unrestricted movement in a circle. The joystick is set into the plastic beneath a mold that restricts movement within an octagon. However, the levels require circular movements and frequent looping. This creates a great deal of frustration on the player’s part, when the circles are coming out choppy and uneven. Catching avian enemies and collecting orbs also became much more difficult due to the poor controls.

There was a bonus feature in this game that didn't make any sense to me: the My Dream area. You could collect odd-looking babies called Nightopians in the levels and they would appear in this open area. The Nightopians were generally annoying to me due to their tendency to cry frequently and the fact that I found their appearance disturbing. In order to survive in the My Dream area, they also had to be fed. I had heard that one of the coolest features of this area was the fact that it had weather integration with the Wii weather channel, but there really wasn't much to do there (other than feeding Nightopians). I found this feature about as useless as the scrapbook in Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Maybe it's a Japanese thing.

Despite the confusion and frustration I felt while playing NiGHTS, it did have a few merits. Aside from the Nightopians, much of the game was quite lovely. Some of the music was pretty good. However, the controls and confusing aspects gave me the feeling that I was missing out on the best parts of most of the levels. I only wish I had a Saturn, so I could go back to the original NiGHTS and see what it was supposed to be.  

Prior to playing Super Smash Bros. Brawl, I had no experience with the series. I had often heard of Brawl tournaments, but I was intimidated by the frenzy and skills of the dedicated fans.

However, there was one tournament that I chose to attend. At GDC, one of my fellow volunteers (CAs) had brought a Japanese Wii with a copy of Brawl. This was before the game’s release, and I thought it would be worth checking out the game, even if it was just for educational purposes. Soon we had a tournament, with rounds scheduled in the evenings. I signed up to play a round, even though I knew that I had no shot at winning.

During the few minutes that I played, I felt that I was given a crash course in crowd dynamics and the real spirit of Smash Bros. While there was some skill involved, a lot of the game seemed to be based on chance and being in the right place at the right time. The controls aren’t very refined, but there are a few things you can do to gain an advantage, such as getting power-ups. The crowd added a whole new dimension to play, as they would cheer when someone did major damage. The crowd also helped me when I got a smash ball by shouting “Press B!” I was playing as Samus, and it was great fun to unleash the Zero Suit version from the bulky armor.

I never bought Brawl, but I have had the chance to play the localized version with my friends. I tried out the co-op mode with one friend, which turned out to be more frustrating than fun. When playing in co-op mode, you only get the number of lives as you would on single player mode. This seems fair until playing through the levels, where enemies are all over the screen and it actually becomes easier to die with a partner taking up prime strategic locations on the screen. It’s much harder to avoid certain ranged attacks, so lives seem to disappear faster.

I played group melee mode with a few different friends. It’s tough to be a beginner because I had little chance of winning, but I felt that I could improve my chances by sticking with certain dependable characters like Pikachu. The skill gap still makes it a bit difficult to have fun (for a sustained period of time), but there is the option of teaming up in melee. I found that it was a lot more fun when I was helping a friend instead of fighting against them.

I didn’t play much of the other modes, but I did watch other friends play. One friend complained about the single-player mode, claiming that the levels were poorly designed so many features were frustrating. When I observed the levels, I began to see how some tricky areas of the levels depended more on chance than skill to get through, such as an area where enemies would continually freeze you because of the way they were lined up.

There were a few elements of this game that really bothered me. First, the sounds were incredibly annoying when you weren’t watching or playing the game. The sound effects were short and repetitive. Characters such as Pikachu with odd voices got on my nerves fast if I wasn’t involved in the game. The pace of the game itself is hyper like the sounds, with changing environments and fast moves. However, the controls can seem slow to respond due to set animation loops, so it leads to impatience on the part of the player. Also, there seemed to be a lot of useless features, such as being able to arrange and photograph trophies or make a virtual scrapbook with stickers. While these features may have appealed more to a Japanese market, it seems a ridiculous waste of time and resources to me when the single-player levels could’ve used more refinement.

While Super Smash Bros. Brawl does come with a few neat features, such as building your own levels, it seems to have a lot of frustrating elements in single-player mode and other areas of the game. It is certainly strongest in the group melee modes, but that comes as no surprise, given the proportion of time players will spend on that mode. It seems that this game could’ve benefited from a better allocation of resources by cutting a few single-player levels or additional features that seem to detract from an otherwise decent fighting game.  

I heard wonderful things about Zack and Wiki, most notably in regards to its innovative puzzles and the return to point-and-click adventure mechanics. Since I grew up with a Mac, I missed the boat on many point-and-click adventures, and I hoped this game would be a fun way to educate myself. While I did learn from Zack and Wiki, the lesson that will likely stick is the scar of its intolerable soundtrack.

Zack and Wiki is full of over-the-top cartoon sounds from the very beginning. While I found it hilarious at first, my good humor wore down after only five minutes. Dialogue is not spoken, but is accompanied by annoying, repetitive sounds. My sidekick, Wiki, would make a high-pitched “Oookiki” sound over and over again. It became very condescending when matched with the tutorial text that made me feel stupid for being a beginner.

While I have very little tolerance for games that belittle the player, especially right at the beginning, there was a plethora of other problems that made Zack and Wiki hard to play. First, the colors were excessively vibrant and felt like a children’s show adjusted to maximum brightness. The graphics of the game looked quite poor on an HDTV and the shortcuts taken in the art cheapened the entire visual style. Cutscenes were way too long and there was simply too much text to wade through. Despite all the dialogue I read, the story was sketchy at best.

As for the click interface, I found it quite limiting. I missed the ability to move freely in an environment. The mechanic where you click where you want your character to go feels outdated. The recent adaptation of this mechanic with the touch screen on the DS is a much more organic use of this type of interface. This leads me to believe that this game would likely be more successful as a DS game. The low-quality graphics and simple puzzles would work better on the small screen. I have found the Wiimote pointer to be much less precise than the DS stylus.

After hearing about the innovative puzzles in Zack and Wiki, I was hoping that it would be fun. Unfortunately, the sound and other shortcomings prevented me from enjoying this game. At its core, however, this game did have spunk. Perhaps it can find a better audience someday with a DS version.  

Cooking is something I enjoy doing in my spare time, so it was only natural that would play Cooking Mama. While it hadn't gotten the most amazing reviews, it seemed like an interesting use of the Wii. I had seen someone playing it at work and wanted to try it out.

I was excited to play this cooking game to see how a Wiimote could be used to "cook." I began the practice exercises. Some of them felt intuitive, like moving the Wiimote down to cut vegetables. Others were a bit odd, like pulling the trigger to get out chopsticks for stir-frying or shaking the Wiimote to open a can.

One of the most frustrating things about cooking with a Wiimote is the variety of actions required in such a short time. Things like cracking an egg are very pressure sensitive and can be incredibly hard at first. Then, 30 seconds later, you do another task that requires a new move that you just learned. It felt a lot like learning a dance when tired – you know the motions but you can't quite remember how they all fit together.

I was hoping I'd enjoy the idea of having a "mama" to grade my progress. When I was young, my mother taught me everything I knew in the kitchen, and she was very supportive and loving. In Cooking Mama, the mother would make comments as you attempted to complete the tasks. I didn't mind the heavily-accented "Good" or "Excellent," but all the
comments weren't quite as positive. For example, every time I failed to crack an egg, I heard a message in seemingly Japanese-English gibberish. After about 10 times, I finally figured out that this Japanese mother was saying "You're not mine" – she was disowning me. Well, Cooking Mama, you're not mine either.

Maybe my ego is just too easily bruised, but I really enjoy games that have a nice learning curve. In a friendly game like Cooking Mama, shouldn't there be more nurturing and less tough love? I really enjoy cooking in real life, and I believe a lot of that is because many of the manual tasks can be relaxing. It's sad that it didn't translate into this game, which turned into a stressful short-term memory test.  

Five months ago, in that basement classroom we Interactive Entertainment majors can call home, I had my first taste of Zelda. I wrote about it on this very blog last October and how impressed I was with the puzzles and charming fantasy world. I thought about buying a GameCube to play it, but it was good thing that I didn’t. Two months later, I had a Wii.

My excitement with Wii games temporarily made me forget that the Wii had backwards compatibility. I had forgotten about playing Zelda until I stumbled upon the Wind Waker strategy guide in a used bookstore for $3. This guide is hard to get for under $30 these days, so I was very excited. I then bought a used GameCube remote and memory card. Now I could play Wind Waker again.

I wanted to savor my return to The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. I sat down on a Friday night and played to my heart’s content. With the help of the strategy guide, I felt like I got a lot more out of the first hour of the game (which is how far I had played before without any help). I already knew what to do for the most part, but it was neat to know certain things, such as which spots to avoid if you don’t want to trigger events yet.

I also discovered some new content in previously-visited areas of the game, such as a mini-game. There was a pig-herding side quest on the island. When I first played, I simply thought it was fun to run around with a pig over my head. However, I now knew that there was a purpose to this silliness. I usually don’t care for mini-games, but I found this one to be fun because of the novelty factor. Some games, like Spyro, have silly herding games with creatures you kick and then make annoying noises. You have to do mini-games like this to move forward. In Wind Waker, this herding game involved pigs that would run away from you but were never too hard to catch if you used your brain. The pigs were believable and not aggravatingly stupid. I felt like I had accomplished something simply by being able to catch the pig, especially since I was rewarded with the amusing animation of a plump pink piglet squirming above my head.

Despite my appreciation for this game, I did learn one important things: I should really spend more time practicing jumps. There is one portion where you must swing on lanterns to get to platforms in a pirate ship. I had a lot of trouble with this thre first time I played, and my previous attempts provided no help when I had to do it again last Friday. Fortunately, I made it through by telling myself each time that it would be the last time. Then, I discovered that all my time spent jumping on lanterns was actually meant to help me. The pirate ship drops you off on an island fortress that also has several lantern jumps. Usually it was only one at a time (and not a string of them). I was glad I had some practice because it significantly reduced the number of times I fell.

Even if I do have a little trouble with jumps at first, I do learn eventually. This is no fault of the game and I actually appreciate a good jump now and then. After all, it’s much more fun to virtually rope jump for me because I’m way too scared to perform many of those stunts in real life. I really enjoyed my experience in Wind Waker and I look forward to playing it more again.  

I have a Wii, and that makes me very happy. However, I feel guilty because my Wii has been neglected lately for the PS2 and my new DS. I thought I’d rent a Wii game to get me playing the Wii again. I chose to rent Elebits, a ridiculously cute-looking game about little creatures that basically are electricity.

My sister was very excited about this game, so I thought I would check it out to see if it was any good. I started with the tutorial, because I had no manual and I knew almost nothing about the game. I wasn’t in much of a hurry, but I found myself getting aggravated easily by the tutorial. It just kept going and going. I spent nearly half an hour on that thing and I had barely done anything. I still didn’t know what the objective of the game was by the time the tutorial was over.

I was wondering if it I was just impatient, but I had my sister play the tutorial as well. Even though there are options to skip the sections of the tutorial, it’s really hard to know what’s important and what’s not. My sister agreed with many of my frustrations, complaining, “it was just too long” and “you could figure out a lot of these things just by playing.”

After the unnecessarily long tutorial, playing a new game triggers an opening cutscene. It’s pretty much like watching a camera pan across drawings in a children’s book – something I’d expect to see on Reading Rainbow. Unfortunately, the voiceover is terrible and sounds nothing like a real child (unless he has severe allergies).

The game is structured a bit like Katamari Damacy, where you have a set time to pick up a bunch of objects in a room. Unlike Katamari, however, you are looking for a specific type of object (elebits) and your perspective does not change throughout the level. Your gun can gradually pick up bigger and bigger objects.

If I had to summarize the gameplay in one sentence, it would be “You tear apart a bunch of rooms in your house so you can scare out some little critters and pick them up with a big gun.” While it is amusing to virtually ransack a room, the fact that I’m not an 8-year child with a temper tantrum takes away some of the novelty. The game itself is very cute, especially as the elebits make some adorable squeaking and mewing sounds. However, the gameplay itself is not that compelling, so I felt like I had experienced most of the game in an hour.

While I do appreciate cute games with great themes and innovative design, I find that Elebits is one of those games that’s good to play – once. The idea of collecting creatures to power appliances is very fun. The gun that allows you to pick up objects is a neat tool, but some of the physics were a bit unrefined (like how it was difficult to pull open a door without it shutting again from your force). I’m glad I rented Elebits, but I think my time is better spent on other games.  

Since I have a Wii, I though it would be a good idea to rent a lot of different games to see what works and what doesn’t. I want to play the new Zelda, but FFXII and now FFVIII are going to fulfill my RPG quota for the next month or two. In the meantime, I decided to check out some more casual games like Rayman Raving Rabbids (discussed earlier) and, more recently, Super Monkey Ball.

I began playing this game with my sister’s boyfriend, who has more of a natural knack for games than I did. For this reason, I didn’t expect to win any of the short mini-games against him, but I really did value his feedback.

The first game we played was a shooter game where the monkeys were in space shuttles and had to shoot aliens. The arena was circular with a bunch of geyser-type structures scattered around that would spit out aliens. The game seemed simple enough, but I had an awful time trying to steer my ship with the Wii motes. Then I had a lot of trouble aiming. I thought maybe it was just me, but my sister’s boyfriend didn’t seem to be doing much better. His score was higher, but he was also complaining about the controls. I wondered if some types of games just don’t translate as well onto the Wii. However, I do not think shooters and the Wii are incompatible – the Raving Rabbids Western-style shooters are very well-designed. I just think this one was put together in a short amount of time and it shows.

One of the advantages to Super Monkey Ball is the fact that there are so many games. So, it was easy to move onto something else after that disappointment. Like Rabbids, each mini-game would provide very limited instructions. This is an effective way to get people into the game quickly, but, if you’ve never even seen the game before, sometimes it can leave players like me a little baffled. One of the games we then played was a game with the goal of collecting as many bugs on a stick as possible without the bugs falling over. The controls were okay, but any temporary lag in the Wii-mote sensor tracking could spell disaster.

We continued playing other mini-games, but were not impressed. There were a few games, such as shooting hoops or catching fruit, that just weren’t that fun. The goals were cute and the ideas all fit well into a theme, but the game felt sloppy. The tuning that comes with repeated playtesting was lacking. I would have appreciated a style more like Rabbids with multiple games of the same type and increasing difficulty to refine the mechanics of the game.

However, Super Monkey Ball is not altogether awful. I think it would be a fun game for a party, as long as no one was playing the game for too long. For casual players, such as my girl friends, I think this game could be fun. It’s very cute and happy. A game like Rabbids would also be fun at a party, but it requires a little more skill. Rabbids is also more crude – some games are based around drilling a rabbid’s teeth when you see a worm and shutting rabbids in outhouses. I would choose this game for a crowd of people who have played games more and come to expect more from them. While I have not personally taken a great interest in Rabbids, I often watched my sister play it with her boyfriend and I thought it was a lot more fun to watch, making it a good choice for parties.  

I finally rented a game for the Wii other than Wii Sports. I got Rayman’s Raving Rabbids. This may seem like an unconventional choice considering the release of the new Zelda game and the popular Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, but I was captivated by the French commercial for Rabbids that I viewed on YouTube. It has a bunch of rabbids playing the game, and there is one particularly memorable scene where there are several rabbids huddled around a couch, all shaking their Wiimotes and nunchucks at the same time. Check it out here:

Rabbids French Trailer

My sister and I finally got around to playing it. The game is set up as levels of four or five mini-games in a gladiator arena base level. There are one or two games from different categories (rhythm, precision, etc.) that all involve different uses of the Wiimote. Many of the games fit into my ideal of mini-games, where you have to play them for two or three times before you can beat them. Some are more successful than others.

By far, I found the rhythm games to be the most fun. They involve shaking the Wiimote and nunchuck in time to the music as raddibs hit a certain spot on the screen. I enjoy music a lot and am a big fan of DDR, so it really appeals me. I also think it is one of the most fun games to watch. My sister and her boyfriend played it in versus mode, and it was hilarious to see two people seated side by side, shaking sticks in time to the ridiculous music and looking completely focused.

Another type of game that seems to translate successfully onto the Wii is the shooter. There are several Western-style shooters in rabbids that are mandatory to complete a level. The Wiimote is used like a computer mouse to aim at the rabbids and shoot them with a plunger gun. There are many friendly features, such as a fairly generous target range (anywhere on the body knocks most rabbids down), short breaks before strings of rabbids, and an endless supply of ammo. The nunchuck is shaken to reload, and the trigger in the right-hand Wiimote is your trigger.

The design is fairly intuitive, and this extends to a great GUI (Graphical User Interface). The ammo and score are displayed along the top. When ammo is depleted (5 plungers at a time), you they turn opaque. The colors and placement of the GUI is very easy to read over a short period of time and never clutters the view.

Some of the other games are severely flawed, however. I grew so frustrated playing one particular game that I quit playing and considered returning the game. It involved pointing the Wiimote at each rabbid’s snorkel mask and then pressing a button to shoot some sort of drink at them. The aiming was absolutely terrible. I couldn’t tell if I was supposed to aim at the eyes of the mask or the snorkel. Also, you have to manage the flow of the drink by constantly shaking the nunchuck, which wasn’t an easy task. I found it very stressful, as the rabbids would creep up to the front, getting bigger and bigger, and then scream in a gremlin-like voice.

This wasn’t the only game with flaws. Many of the games offer only a very brief set of instructions, which is fast and convenient but often fail to tell you important details. For example, on a labyrinth game, you had to figure out that you could slide your ball into a weak wall to break it and take a shortcut necessary to win. Certain secrets are fine with me, but I really prefer to play games where the secrets are not mandatory to win. Games become much more accessible to a wider audience if you save the secrets for those who really want to go through the trouble to find them. Secrets such as those involved to complete puzzles in adventure games turn many players off; veteran players often look up the answers online or use strategy guides. With so many games to play, there is less time to waste on frustrating secrets.

Despite Raving Rabbids’ flaws, I think I will continue playing it for a little while longer. It is nice to be able to pick up a game without worrying about when to find the next save point (each game is about a minute or two long). Even so, I do not find it a stellar use of the Wii technology and hope to find something that better utilizes the Wii’s potential.  

Many families want a Wii under their tree this Christmas. I was lucky enough to obtain one before Christmas. When I went to visit my mother for the holidays, she decided to invite her neighbors over to play Wii Sports.

These neighbors have lived in smaller towns in Arizona for a long time. They have three children, and the teenage son is the main gamer in the family. Their younger daughter plays computer games (her Christmas list included Civilization IV) and the rest of the family is more or less indifferent towards games.

At first, only the son and the younger daughter played the Wii. The son is a quiet high schooler, but he actually got somewhat animated and showed a sign of a smile while playing the Wii. He played tennis with his sister (who managed to beat him a couple of times) and really got into it. The younger daughter really enjoyed playing the Wii and stayed long after everyone else had gone to practice her skills in Wii tennis and golf.

A couple days later, they came back to play again. We had invited the children, but before we knew it, we had all five of our neighbors and two guests who had come over to see what all the commotion was about. The daughter played against her father in Wii Sports boxing. They stood side by side, staring intently at the screen, jabbing and dodging like pros. The father didn’t really play games, and yet he was able to find a technique that allowed him to consistently get strikes and spares in bowling.

It seems that the intuitive design of the motion control in Wii Sports allows people who don’t play games very often to jump right in with the regular gamers. Even people who may not have grown up with games can apply techniques from real life to the games in Wii Sports. However, one of the guests who came along was an engineer. He quickly noticed how the motion control was based more on acceleration than actual swings and arm motions. While it seems that the acceleration-based control was designed to coordinate with regular sports motions, another friend of mine noticed that games such as boxing can be beaten easily with simple wrist flicks.

While Wii Sports’ motion control may not be the most sophisticated in its techniques, it does allow great potential form bringing families and friends together. At its core, the Wii can become a great party console where everyone gets a turn – and a chance to try something really fun.  

Today is a very happy day. I finally got my own Wii.

I smuggled the Wii inside from my car, afraid someone might catch a glimpse of my prize. I opened the box and felt I had something truly special. It was the first time I’ve ever gotten a console when it was first released. Perhaps it was because I could actually afford one and I care more about games now than ever before.

I set up the Wii and decided to make a Mii. Like any avatar, there seem to be three choices: making it look like you, making it look like an idealized version of you, or creating something completely different. I chose to make one look like me. It’s a lot of fun to scrutinize your face and features and try to see what makes you look like you. I was pretty pleased with my Mii.

After my Mii was made, I played Wii Sports. I was all alone when I played it and I was so happy. There is something so novel about motion control. Even something as simple as tennis becomes exciting when you really get to swing your arm and get tired. It’s amazing to feel physically exhausted after playing a video game. I fully explored the game, playing all the sports and even taking a fitness test. (I got age 65.)

When my sister came home, she made her own Mii (a pint-sized version of herself). Then we played golf together. I have never really cared for golf in real life and especially disliked golf games. They always seemed really boring. However, Wii Sports golf is much more accessible. Clubs hardly matter and neither does direction. It’s more about how you swing the Wii remote and acceleration.

Perhaps my most exciting experience with my Wii thus far was in obtaining an extra nunchuck. I had been looking online for them and had found that prices were very high – around $50 for a $20 item. I resigned myself to the fact that I would have to wait a long time to get one.

Fortunately, I ran into some luck when visiting family in Portland, Oregon. I walked into a Fred Meyer and, on a whim, I decided to check the electronics department. I was shocked to find several Wii accessories (nunchucks and remotes, at least three of each) just sitting on the shelf. I already had an extra remote, but I needed a nunchuck, so I snatched it up right away at $19.99. I didn’t even have to pay tax (because there’s no tax in Oregon). I asked the clerk how they had so many Wii accessories and it turns out they had gotten them in that morning. While the Wii may not be quite as popular in Portland, Oregon as it was in Los Angeles, it had still been selling out quickly and I was lucky to have walked in that day.

With my lucky Wii nunchuck, I can now challenge my sister to a round of Wii Sports boxing. Hooray for the Wii!  

I got to play a PS3 today. A recent graduate in my program came into one of my classes, and she happens to be developing a downloadable game for the PS3. I was excited to hear her speak about how she started her career and even more excited to play the prototype on the PS3.

While the prototype was not complete, much of the artwork and animation was in place. My classmates and I were all very impressed when she put in the cheats so we could see the final forms for the creatures you can control.

I watched a few people play using only motion control - no buttons or analog sticks. The game is a 2D/3D hybrid that is very dynamic and captivating. It was amusing to watch some of my classmates use the motion control, over-compensating and wiggling around in an uncoordinated dance.

When it was finally my turn, I moved the controller in more moderate movements and found that it was quite intuitive. I enjoyed moving my character with only motions themselves, rather than being artificially separated with button-mashing or stick-pushing.

However, I found that the motion control was not as revolutionary as I would have hoped. At its heart, I was still just moving a controller around, but at least it was in a 3D environment (rather than the confining limits of analog sticks, triggers, and buttons). While the motion control felt natural, it was not as if I merged with the game. Even if I was playing on an enormous projection, it made no difference.

So where will games go next? How will motion control become innovative rather than boring? I am excited to play the Wii and compare. I hope developers will take advantage of the next-gen possibilities of the Wiimote and the PS3’s motion controls as they become more commonplace. We may not have the Virtual Reality we once dreamed of for the future, but at least we can create a more immersive experience through the motion control in the next-gen consoles.