Features// The Wii House: Welcome to the House of Fun

We will be bringing you our full first impressions and hands-on with the games mentioned above with every other Wii launch title over the coming weeks.

From the very brief few minutes we managed to grab on the Zelda: Twilight Princess, it was apparent that the controls seemed intuitive (much better than we’d imagined) and the graphics looked, as you would expect, like an up-scaled GameCube game. In fact, all we wanted to do at that moment was forget about taking pictures of the stupid Wii House and just sit down and play the game until our fingers bled. Which we will get to do very soon (without the bleeding fingers bit, hopefully).

After our whistle-stop photo-tour of the house, Stuart the Snapper - who is not a gamer in any sense of the word - picked up Wii Play and after a short blast declared, “Hmmm I might have to get one of these,” adding as a disclaimer, with a wink, “for the kids, you understand.”

It turns out that Stuart is Nintendo’s target consumer for Wii. Although has never particularly been ‘into’ games, like pretty much everyone who grew up in the 70s and 80s, he has a fondness for arcade classics (“Can you get Donkey Kong on this?”). He also has four children, all of whom like videogames to varying degrees. With this in mind he loved the pick-up-and-play mini/party games of Wii Play, which he could imagine, “keeping me and the kids entertained for hours.”

SPOnG has booked in some extended play-testing sessions at the Wii house over the coming days and weeks as we approach the December 8th launch in Europe. Our request to Nintendo’s usually very helpful PR team that we might move into the loft for the next two months unfortunately fell on deaf ears. This was probably due to the fact that several hundred main-stream hacks had got lost up there and, without GPS or their media magnate’s word on velum had no idea how to exit...