Wii love it (or at least I do)

The new video game console from Nintendo, the Wii (pronounced as the first-person plural pronoun "we") is fun. We had been trying since the thing came out in November or December to secure one, but without avail until last Sunday. It comes with a game, "Wii Sports", which has simple versions of bowling, tennis, boxing, baseball, and golf. In each of these, the player is represented by what Nintendo calls a Mii, a custom-made avatar which each player creates to suit his or her tastes and saves on the wireless remote control. Now - as an aside - if I choose to take my remote control to someone else's house to play games with them on their Wii, I can take my mii with me. This game is by far more fun with multiple players, so we bought a second wireless remote and another game, called "Wii Play," with some more silly, idiosyncratic mini-games that show off the fun motion sensitivity of the Wii's remotes: table tennis, target shooting, billiards and so forth.

These motion-sensitive remotes are the best thing about the Wii, what clearly distinguishes it from its more-expensive competitors, the Sony Playstation 3 and the Microsoft Xbox 360: the Wii's controls are intuitive for non-video gamers. Swing the controller and you swing the baseball bat. Point and squeeze the trigger and the target explodes. This is so much better than the progressively more-complex, arcane codes needed to perform simple actions on the traditional, super-powered, super-expensive consoles.