Nintendo Wii Fanboy

This week's big release is none other than Wii Fit. It's not only something many of you diehard Wii fans have been looking forward to, but also the mainstream public. Mothers and kids, grandparents and siblings, people from all walks of life have raised an eyebrow and perked their ears up after hearing about it. People are down with the fitness bundle.

Are you? Did you get your copy of Wii Fit yet? Are you planning on getting in some quality workout time this weekend? Are you playing something else? What are you playing?

CBS anchor Katie Courc thinks that Manhunt 2 is very dangerous. Why? Well, because the vicious acts of murder that are portrayed within aren't carried out in the usual manner, as a player presses buttons on a controller (you do press buttons in Manhunt 2 for the Wii, by the way), but by "wielding a knife, an axe, and a glass shard" to dispatch their opponent. We haven't seen the box for this thing yet, but it would have to be pretty big to include all of these things.

But, what really gets us is the mainstream media's assumption that kids just walk into stores every day and purchase games that are rated "Mature." Even if this happens, and the kid takes said game home and plays it, what about the parents? Are they so absent-minded and uninterested in their child's life that they won't hear the curse words coming from their TV or hear the sounds of these murders (gurgling and the like, we imagine), let alone spend a few seconds to ask what they're playing or, dare we ask, watch their kid play it?

You know, we can understand your stance against violent media in general (well, maybe not everyone's), but the detachment is there. You're holding a white Wiimote and nunchuk, it's not like you could honestly think that you're some crazy psycho killer out there performing murder with no repercussions for your actions. If the game came with a life-sized dummy that you had to choke from behind with the cord connecting nunchuk and Wiimote together for points, then we might be willing to entertain the mainstream media's concerns.

It all comes down to the parents.

[Via Joystiq]

Though the gaming press's reactions to Nintendo's E3 media briefing have been, for the most part, lukewarm, mainstream publications are very positive about WiiFit's debut. Here are a few headlines that enunciate the differences in perception between the gaming hardcore and the general public:

• Forbes: "Can The Wii Save Your Life?"
• Washington Post: "Game On - Nintendo Is Star of E3 Show as Rivals Scramble to Catch Up"
• San Jose Mercury News: "Wii outplays Sony, Microsoft for now" (requires registration)

The Mercury News went so far as to fashion together an automaton (see image above) out of coils and Wii scraps in order to illustrate Nintendo's domination. We'd be too scared to even compete with the company, knowing that this ED-209-esque villain could break into our houses and stamp us out at any moment. Jump past the post break for a better view of its hulking figure.

Will the Wii help move the internet into the living room? Some people think that Nintendo's sleek new system might just succeed at what Microsoft has been hoping to do since day one: turn the home gaming console into a media center, and thus move our multimedia experience to the sofa. The combination of the Opera browser and the Wii remote makes couch-surfing (pun intended) stupidly easy. No, you're not going to transcribe War and Peace without a keyboard, but for anyone used to text messaging, the interface and predictive text make typing far easier than we might have expected.

You guys may not have been 100% in love with the Wii browser, but one comment from yesterday's discussion really stood out: the ease of watching videos, despite some limitations with the browser and Flash support. Forget what we can't do right now; that can always be changed. Think instead about the ease of watching YouTube from the sofa with a remote control. Once again, these aspects of the Wii aren't really about us (though we can certainly reap the benefits along with everyone else). We're not going to buy a console just to browse the internet or play tennis; we're interested in lots of games on our consoles, and we have phones and handhelds and computers with which we can trade cat pictures and the always-hilarious head of Leonidas. This is about the people who never even noticed the game consoles before. It's about that 30% of households predicted to own a Wii by 2011. The Wii remote puts all of what we take for granted quite literally in the palm of their hands, and because of that, it really could change the face of the internet. Browsing from the sofa is a different experience, after all.

We'll wait and see ... but it's plausible, don't you think? Where do you see the web in three years?

We hear a lot about mainstream coverage of the Wii, but what about non-mainstream coverage? The Mii Channel is so much fun that even indie cartoonist James Kochalka wants in on the "HEY LOOK AT MY MIIS" fun, posting a series of Mii creations to his diary comic American Elf .

His Mii creations veer toward the monsterish, which we enjoy. So many people limit their Mii designs to themselves, their grandparents, and celebrities. Unless these Miis are meant to represent Kochalka's family, in which case we're very, very sorry.

We also love how the Mii Channel has resurrected the practice of sharing photographs of TV screens. It makes us nostalgic for magazine high-score columns.