Having Fun With Nintendo's Wii Console

Video games as a hobby are usually played in teenage bedrooms. When they’re around ten years old, you buy them a games console and then they disappear for hours on end, emerging from time to time for toilet breaks and to stock up on fizzy drinks and snacks.

However, that all changed when the Nintendo Wii console was released. It soon became apparent that Nintendo's Wii was a console more suited to the living room than the bedroom. There are a variety of reasons for this.

First of all, the Wii’s motion sensitive controller (the wii-mote) meant that the manner in which games were played was much more intuitive. Games were easier to learn, no need to remember that button X is to jump, button Y lets you breathe fire and button Z executes a back-flip. In fact, Wii games are so easy to play that even adults can learn them in a matter of minutes.

Also, due to the physical aspects of Wii games, there’s some exercise involved. Not just Wii Fit – but virtually all of the Wii games involve a certain element of jumping around, much more so than the typical games found on other consoles. That requires a bit of elbow room.

Somehow or other, for reasons which are difficult to pinpoint exactly, the Wii console and Wii games seem to have a more social element than has been previously seen with other console or PC games. You can “play the computer” if you want of course, but Wii games tend to be much more fun as part of a group of gamers.

Maybe it’s the fact that you have to dance around, wave your arms about and generally make yourself look a bit silly at times. Whatever it is, the Wii is undeniably best when conducted as a group activity.

As cheesy as it sounds, the Wii is genuinely great fun for kids of all ages. Wii games can be a social event, they can help you to exercise and lose weight and they are a lot of fun. The key thing is that the Wii has taken video games out of teenager’s bedrooms and placed them right in the middle of the family living room.

As a matter of fact, this might go some way to explaining the success when Nintendo recently “went to the dark side” and released a black Wii console in Europe just before Christmas. It turned out to be a very popular choice with customers – maybe due to the fact that the black colour matched the other devices in their living rooms. As yet, the black Nintendo Wii console has not been launched in America.