Nintendo Wii Fanboy

One of the Wii's most striking achievements to date has been its ability to draw in those who previously couldn't give two hoots about gaming. Whether they're young, old, or older, Ninty's console has its fair share of gaming converts.

Today, we want to hear about those conversions. Have any of you personally managed to convince family or friends to embrace videogames through the power of Wii? We want to hear about how your Aunt Ethel now plays Metroid, or how your grandfather dabbles in Zack & Wiki. More to the point, we want to know how you got the message across, and brought them over to the light side.

Maybe you're even reading this as a fresh, wide-eyed convert yourself, in which case, tell us about what won you over!

Finally, I'll be able to share my menagerie of rapper Miis with the entire world! Nintendo announced today that it will launch its Check Tupac Mii Out Channel this Sunday, November 11th, rewarding your "creative spirit" by making the new feature available for free in the Wii Shop Channel's WiiWare category.

The Posting Plaza section of the Check Mii Out channel enables you to post, trade, or browse through different Miis. You can tag your favorites or kidnap them and raise the Miis as your own. In addition to listings for current/all-time favorites and a searchable database, a random selection of 1,000 Miis will be available for you to look through.

The channel will also offer a contest section in which you can try to match your Mii to a specific character or theme (e.g. rappers, dead rappers, rappers with "Young" or "Lil" in their stages names, etc.). You'll have a week to create and enter your Mii, and users will spend the week after voting on the best submissions.

Which of your prized Miis are you going to upload first?

Japanese business paper The Nikkei recently published a piece titled Software Houses Miscalculate Audience, Demand For Wii, wherein author Tomoyuki Kawai cites that many inside sources are not looking to the Wii with such a favorable eye any longer. The big worry is that all of this success the Wii has had has only benefited Nintendo and them alone, with many third-party developers jumping on board only to be left with titles on their hands that failed to sell. It's these development studios that are supposedly not profiting compared to their previous year earnings, the result being a lack of support for the console and no desire to commit to it in the future.

The piece goes on to say that a lot of the Wiis picked up by consumers have only started to gather dust (it's unconfirmed if this is the same report we've posted about here earlier).

Nintendo recently filled the inboxes of Japanese Wii consoles with a message about the "Mii Popularity Channel's" upcoming release. According to Siliconera, Wii owners will be able to download the new channel and vote for their favorite Miis as early as April 29th. Whether or not this is the worldwide release date hasn't been confirmed, but channel updates tend to occur on the same day.

The Mii Popularity Channel (not the official name) was announced last week at Shigeru Miyamoto's GDC keynote. Similar to the Everybody Votes Channel, users will be asked to pick out their preferred Mii from a lineup. The Mii that wins the majority vote will not only be crowned the "most popular kid" at school, but will enjoy the benefits of a fashionable wardrobe, invitations to every weekend party, and dates with the best-looking jocks or cheerleaders. That's life.

How many channels do you have on your Wii menu, including downloaded VC games, and how many of those channels do you actually use? We're guilty of downloading games and letting them sit there for a while before we replay them (talking to you, Super Castlevania IV), and there are others that we rarely use at all.

It's probably also fair to say that the latest channel news has been pretty unexpected. We got a channel out of nowhere, and now we're slated to get another channel, the mysterious Popularity Channel. The Wii's only been out six months, and those menu screens are filling up. How many channels do you think will be added by the end of the Wii's first full year?

Miyamoto's keynote revealed that he is making a new Channel. This new Channel will allow people to compete in popularity contests with their Miis. Now, we don't have any concrete information other than that, nor do we have images of the new Channel, but isn't this enough for us to form an opinion on the concept? You bet it does!

Join us past the post break where we each discuss what we think about the new proposed channel.

Wii isn't just disappearing from store shelves -- it's also dominating search engines. It's probably all those people who didn't get there until after the shelves were already empty looking for a deal on eBay, but whatever the reason, the Nintendo Wii takes the top spot as far as searches for electronics go. Web analytics firm Hitwise compiled the list of most-searched-for electronics and discovered that the Wii and the iPod, in its various forms, are busily pwning just about everything else tucked cozily within the tubes of the 'net.

Here's the full list:

1. Nintendo Wii
2. iPod
3. Wii
4. iPods
5. iPod Nano
6. iPod Shuffle
7. PSP
8. PlayStation 3
9. Xbox 360
10. Xbox (?)

Ouch. We know third place isn't so bad, but all the other guys are really far down there. And we, uh, have third place, too. In case you didn't notice.