mendax.org

The Wii collecting dust in our living room has been eager for our attention, humming with it’s blue luminescence every few weeks. We ignore it, however, because of our sad disappointment with the Wii’s game library. Almost a year ago, we had a similar complaint, and though things are looking less grim for the future, there haven’t been many great improvements in recent months. Nonetheless, the impending release of Wii Fit has our novelty alarms going off, and so we decided to turn our Wii on for the first time in many a month, so as to get it ready for the Fit. The experience was, well, average. If you haven’t touched your Wii in ages either, follow our guide below:

Step One: Turn on the Wii and grab the latest system update. Realize that there’s nothing particularly noticeable about the upgrade, other than the fact that it took much longer than expected. Surf the Internet while the download finishes, and make sure to turn down the volume, as you’ve probably forgotten just how annoying the Wii system sounds can get.

Step Two: Check the Wii Shop and download, in order, the Nintendo Channel, and the Check Mii Out Channel. Apparently, one still can’t download stuff in the background, and instead has to watch the Mario jumping sequence until a download finishes. Surf the Internet in the meantime. We would have downloaded the new Photo Channel, but it removes the ability to play mp3 files. Yeah, sounds like a real upgrade. The Wii Ware games sound interesting, but there’s limited information about them. Click on the “more” button and realize there’s not really more information about the games there, either. And by “more,” we mean “more usefu”. Now get annoyed that Nintendo could easily have put in some resizable screenshots of these games in the “more info” section, but instead wants you to guess how good the games are. We did, which is why we didn’t download any.

Step Three: Launch the Nintendo Channel and check out its offerings. What’s this, no full-screen videos? And, the videos for the Wii Ware games look like amateur trailers, with little real info about the games included. Surprise, surprise. There isn’t even a combat sequence shown in Final Fantasy’s My Life as King. At least the first-party videos are more informative. Overall, the videos made us want Wii Fit and Mario Kart more, but diminished our desire to check out any of the Wii Ware titles.

Step Four: Check out Check Mii Out Channel. Novelty value high, but looks like it would ultimately be a time sink. We’re told that “Hitler” Miis were banned, but that didn’t stop us from posting A.H. Overall, we’re impressed with user submissions, many of which are pretty good caricatures of celebrities and fictional characters. Of the latter, some were put together very creatively: Spider Man, Venom, Garfield, etc. Mark your favorites and download the ones you want, because no Wii is happy without is very own Snoop Dogg Mii.

Step Five: Briefly check out the Internet Channel to make sure mendax.org displays reasonably well. It does, though the pictures we’ve been embedding in our posts could use to be downsized some. Check out WiiCade for updates, but the most popular games are still the ones we played a year ago. Meh.

Step Five: Shut the bastard down and wait for Wii Fit. That comes out tomorrow, doesn’t it? In the meantime, do like we’ve been doing for the last year: spend time with the 360 instead.

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