Take a look at my Wii opinion





As you've probably heard by now, the very first of my "E3 predictions" is now wrong. The Nintendo Revolution has been renamed... it is "Wii." When I first heard it, I hated it. My immediate thought: "OMG, Nintendo = st00pid. They've gone and shot themselves in the foot." But the more I thought about it and after reading their official Wii site (with the cool Flash movie of the i-People playing around), the more I like it. Dare I say, I think it's the right choice. (Note that I'm not saying "best choice" or "awesome choice.")

It's different. It's very non-videogame. It's going to appeal to the consumer that maybe wouldn't normally buy a "game system" but is interested in hip new electronic gadgets, a la iPod. It's certainly a memorable name. Even if you think it's ridiculous, you have to admit that it didn't take long for it to stick in your brain. Whether or not the machine ends up successful, it is a very interesting and risky gamble for a hardware company to make in a world of PlayStation 3s and Xbox 360s. They've gone in a completely different direction, and since that's the philosophy of the Revolution to begin with, Wii makes a little bit (a wee bit) of sense.

I also gotta say that Nintendo made the right choice to unveil the name prior to E3. Now we get over a week to talk about how silly it is and get that out of our systems before we start seeing the really important stuff -- the games. That's what I'm really looking forward to. We've not seen the system in action with real, planned games. That will be the true test of whether Wii has legs. I don't even have to ask myself if I'll be buying one -- I will. I have a 360 and the Wii will be my secondary system. I plan to preorder a PS3 but may end up eBaying that depending on what the lineup looks like at E3 and what supply is like during Christmas. I frankly don't think I'll *need* a PS3 with the kind of lineups the 360 and Wii will have in the 4th quarter. I'll have enough to buy/play.

Back to the name, though -- I don't love the name. But we only have a small portion of the entire picture right now. Maybe it'll become clearer once we know what games are coming, what the deal is with the Virtual Console, etc. Wii will certainly do just fine in Japan, and perhaps that's all that matters to Nintendo. A lot of their decision-making has been solely on the Japanese market and those decisions have so far translated fairly well to the rest of the world. Why wouldn't this one? Clearly, Nintendo had to have anticipated the overwhelmingly negative attitude towards the name over the last few months, and has made up their mind that this is the way they're going and they're not gonna change just because it "sounds weird" to every other language but Japanese. I have to applaud them. They're throwing out the industry rule book and making up their own. That's some balls.

So do I think the name is weird? Yeah. I still do. But ya know what, I've thought that a lot of console names have been strange the first time I heard them: Game Boy. Dreamcast. PlayStation. Xbox. Virtual Boy. GameCube. DS. But I got used to those eventually and I'm positive that this will be no different.

Oddly enough, my positive opinion on Wii that I posted to NeoGAF landed me a quote on mtv.com's news story about the name change. Two-thirds of the way down: "There has been an occasional positive comment about the name. A NeoGAF poster named SuperPac wrote, "I like it. It's not the name of a game system. It's an iconic name like iPod. The more I think about it, the more I think this is the right choice." Hilariously enough, I am the only positive commenter in the article. Yowza.

After all's said and done I'm glad we finally have a name for the thing. Though it is going to be kinda odd to ask the clerk at Target if you can have a Wii. The system name's tailor-made for prank calls.

Posted: Thu - April 27, 2006 at 11:49 PM         | |

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