While rummaging through the ol’ Interweb tonight, I somehow got onto Wii’s official site and came across a whole slew of new videos that were posted yesterday. Most of them show people trying out the Wii for the first time, and they actually look like they’re having fun. Never mind the fact that they get paid to play with something we’re all dying for.
But what really interested me were some new videos for the Wii Channels. I’ll detail a few of them here:
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The Internet Channel was finally unveiled, and I have to say it’s looking pretty snazzy. They pulled up Google and searched in a couple shots, and the browser, which is based on Opera by the way, ran fairly smoothly. They were using a widescreen TV, but the browser was formatted to a 4:3 ratio. Either it’s not formatted at all for widescreen TV’s, or they just forgot about that part. Either way, it still looked good enough to actually read the text. The browser also let you zoom in on certain parts of the page. This will probably help out some people if they have smaller TV’s. You readers with your big-screen HDTV’s might find this option to be a bit superflous, however.
The Photoviewer actually lets you edit your pictures in a few interesting ways. In the video, the user crops out a portion of a picture, and then puts it into another picture. She then erased some of the crap that was in the cropped picture, and viola! It now looks like one picture. The cool feature here was that you set how big your eraser was by moving closer or farther away from the TV with the wiimote. Don’t worry, you don’t have to move your couch or anything. Oh, and they way you browse through the pictures is trippy. All the pictures form into a tornado and float to the top of the screen. Color me tickled pink on that one.
The Mii Channels, the Weather Channel, and the News Channel are all the same from before, but after knowing about that feature where your Mii can infest other people’s Wii’s, it makes the whole Mii experience even more intriguing.
Even though some people have expressed concern about the price of the Wii, you still get a lot of bang for your buck with the system. Check out the videos for yourselves at wii.com.