BrandonLive

Downhill from here.

So I called up my friend who had a Wii pre-ordered weeks ago so that I could add him to my friend’s list.  I guess I kind of took for granted that a modern console with an online service would have such a thing – though I began to worry for a while since it’s very difficult to find (you go to the “Message Board” and then “Write new message” and then “Address Book” – yeah, wtf).  But here’s the kicker – you don’t have a screenname.  Nope, you basically have to pass someone a MAC address.  Actually a MAC address is shorter since it’s in hex.  Your “Wii Code” is 16-digits (looks just like a CC number).  Good luck memorizing that one and passing it to your friends. 

And let’s say you do manage to remember your own Wii Code and write it down for a friend – that’s not good enough.  You also need his or hers before any kind of communication can be made.  Absolutely absurd. 

So then I got a few friends onto my friends list (a few had to wait a couple days before then Nintnedo network acknowledged our friendship), time to play some games right?  Wrong.  No launch games support online play.  Not one.  Pathetic. 

Oh well, at least I can see which of my friends are online and what they’re doing, right?  Nope.  The Wii maintains a list of “Today’s Accomplishments” in the message board, but I’ve found no way to share it with friends or view their accomplishments or standings in games.  I can’t invite anyone to chat, since there’s no chat capability.  I can’t invite anyone to play games because there are no multiplayer games.  And even if there were, it appears there’s no mechanism for sending such an invitation, unless maybe you both happen to be playing the same game and the game developer decides to let you find each other.

So what can I do with my Wii friends online?  Well, I can send them text messages.  But that seems to be it.  Oh, and I can send pictures (but not from my computer – lame) and “Mii” characters (cool, but the novelty wears off quick without any games, details, or communications functionality). 

I have to ask… Did anyone at Nintendo ever even try an Xbox 360?  Did they ever try out Xbox Live?  The only explanation I can think of is that no, they never tried it.  If they had, they would have been far too embarassed to actually deliver such an incomprehensibly awful online service.

I, like other mortals, do not have a PS3.  But I can’t help but think that Sony can take some small pleasure from the fact that whatever their online service is like, it cannot be this bad.

For Nintendo, there is a bright side.  And that bright side is that these problems can be fixed.  Until then, the Wii is entertaining at parties and a good Zelda machine.  But if it really wants to be a “next-gen” console, it needs to wake up to a little thing called the internet.

Back to Part 1

The letdown.  When did I first feel disappointment with the Wii?  The moment I tried to take it online.  Setting up my wireless connection was super easy – “good,” I thought, they’ve thought this thing through.  I couldn’t have been more wrong.

WiiConnect24 is a joke.  There, I’ve said it.  As soon as I connected to the service, it told me it needed to update my Wii.  Okay – they probably had some features that they wanted to test as much as possible before release, and they were probably just the online features so delivering the final bits through the service made sense enough.  I’ll just wait 10 seconds while it downloads and applies the update. 

Then I’ll wait some more.  And some more.  About ten minutes later the anemic little progress bar showed some signs of life and soon afterward the download completed.  Okay now I’ll select my location from a large list of countries.  Why didn’t it ask me this during its initial setup?  Whatever, I’ll scroll down and select the US so that I can get to some online goodness.  But wait, there’s an update available that needs to be downloaded.  Again.  Are they serious?  Apparently they are, and another 10+ minutes of my first day with the Wii is spent watching a progress bar.  Little did I know, I would soon miss that little guy.

When I finally got online with the Wii I decided to check out their “Virtual Console” system and online store.  So off to the Shop Channel I go.  After entering my credit card information (including overcoming a REALLY ugly UI bug that resulted in entering the expiration date via guesswork), I purchased some Nintendo Points.  I decided the first game I would download would be Mario 64 – an old favorite of mine (even though I also own it on the DS).  So I stuck in an SD card and decided I’d download it there.  But oh no, the Wii had other plans.  It even told me, “Hey, I know you’d probably like to download this onto that there SD card.  That’s what I would want to do too.  Unfortunately, my designer was waaaaay too lazy to allow that.  So you’ll have to download it into main memory, and then go all the way out to the Wii menu, go into the obscure memory management page under system settings, and move it to the SD card later on.  It should only take about 10 extra minutes, have fun!  ”

Whatever, let’s just start the download so I can get back to looking at the rest of their catalog.  Surprise!  No background downloads on the Wii.  I mean, it’s not like some other console made this mistake and had to fix it in the last year after an outcry from the users.  Perhaps Nintendo just likes learning things the hard way?

Anyway this is where I quickly started to miss my old friend the lame grey progress bar.  Instead of him, I got an 8-bit Mario running across my screen picking up coins at random intervals, making annoying and non-rhythmic but repetitive sounds that I am certain qualify as a form of torture.  And he kept going, and going.  If it weren’t for the “mute” button on my remote, I’m certain I would have gone insane and started flipping over cars or something.

Once it’s done I find that Mario 64 is now taking up a slot on the Wii’s “home screen.”  Not in a “Virtual Console” menu, or even a “Virtual N64 games” menu.  No, it’s got a spot all to itself.  Yeah, that’ll scale.  Oh, and get this – when I go back to buy more Nintendo Points, I have to re-enter my credit card and billing information!!!  No option to save it.  No account to bind to.  What could possibly compel a company to make it unnecessarily hard to give them my money is beyond my comprehension.

So the Shop Channel and Virtual Console need some work. 

Continue to Part 3 to see what else they screwed up.

In business, there are advantages and disadvantages to being first-to-market.  For example, when the Xbox 360 launched a year before its competitors it earned technical leadership, a long period of being “the only choice,” a head-start for building an installed base, and a whole lot of time for developers to get comfortable with it.  On the other hand, launching first can be very risky.  Most significant is that in the intervening time, the playing field can change.  For example, a crucial hardware feature that can’t be added later might become exceedingly important – and the competition will have time to jump on that technology and get it into their boxes.

What’s more, your competition knows exactly what you’re offering.  They can see your strengths, and your weaknesses.  They can make sure that they don’t get called out for the same mistakes you made.  They can and will learn from your mistakes… unless their name is Nintendo.

I picked up my Wii about 9 hours after its official launch.  I arrived at Best Buy in Bellevue around 8AM, and as I approached the line a blue-shirted fellow handed me a ticket saying, “Wow, we have just enough.”  In fact, they had 101 consoles on hand and I was the 100th person to arrive – and I only had to wait about an hour in the rain.  This was of course greatly preferrable to last year’s 15 hour wait.

Wiimote – A step forward.  When I got it home my housemate Jon (half-asleep from a fruitless attempt to procure a Wii the night before) and I set up our first game of Wii Sports.  It was great, it was fun – it was just as compelling as when I played it at MindCamp a week or so beforehand.  This is what Nintendo promised – fun, engaging gameplay where you won’t care about the unrealistic graphics.  And this was just the freebie bundled-in game.

Graphics – aka The trade-off.  Most of us that follow the video game scene knew that Nintendo was basically using slightly beefed up Gamecube hardware inside the Wii.  This allowed them to offer a compelling price point, make millions of consoles very quickly, and ostensibly require developers to do “less work” (at least on visuals).  But if you’ve been playing an Xbox 360 for the last year (or modern PC games), playing a Wii will be very jarring.  I haven’t yet been able to acquire the elusive component video cable (WHY is this not included???), but games on the Wii just look bad.  At the best of times they look like a game on the original Xbox, and often worse.

But that’s okay.  Nintendo offered us a deal.  We look beyond the last-gen visuals, and they’ll give us totally new gaming experiences at an affordable price and with fewer hassles.  It’s all about fun with Nintendo, they said.

Continue to Part 2