Where’s My Flying Car?

To the Editor: I’ve had a Wii for about three weeks now. Before the Wii all my video game playing involved me going up to my loft and logging into WoW while my wife sat alone watching TV for the night. Ever since I walked in the door that fateful night three weeks ago my wife and I do something at night that I never thought we’d ever do. We play video games together. And it’s amazing. She is particularly fond of bowling and has become very competitive at it, with pro status and a high score of 284.

This past weekend we took the Wii with us to her parent’s house for a late Christmas. Her older brother and younger sister both came with wife/husband and our 1- and 3-year old nieces in tow. When the kids were put to bed around 8PM we all went up to the pool room and played the Wii all night long, every night for the duration of our stay there. To be honest I don’t think my wife’s parents have played a videogame in their lives…but they got hooked on the wii. The second night my mother-in-law played she reached pro status and got a high score of 233. My father-in-law tore up my younger brother-in-law in 3 rounds of boxing. We probably had the most fun we’ve ever had as an entire family and it’s thanks to Nintendo and their amazing little console.

– Iain Burns

In response to “Skill-Stick Revolution” from The Escapist Forum: I, um, hate to be the one to break it to you, but aside from the more comfortable grip and the extra pair of shoulder buttons, the 360 controller is largely the same as the Xbox’s, and not terribly different from the Gamecube’s. So the innovative part is not the controller, but how it’s used. Not that it at all undermines the point of the article. It’s strange, though – sports games, by conventional wisdom, are the place you’d be least likely to see change in the formula.

– Bongo Bill

In response to “Seed on the Road” from The Escapist Forum: We never got a chance to play seed even tho me and my boyfriend had long awaited it but we had connection problems and werent too keen on paying the price they wanted for a game that appeared broken. We crossed our fingers and hoped it would get things straight and i checked from time to time but then one day the page wouldnt open and i knew it was a goner. If I had the money I would have invested in seed because I think it was a great idea and that there is definitely a niche in the game community for this type of game.

– catalyzt

To the Editor: I think you should do an article about how games are spreading out. While 6th generation consoles were very similar in muscle it was not uncommon for big-name publishers to release games on all the consoles, meeting the capabilities of the weakest of the systems, which was the gamecube mostly because of the smaller capacity of the proprietary disk, but the games didn’t seem weak by comparison when something on the xbox could also be run on the gamecube. With the new generation of consoles, the proscessing power of the consoles is spreading out with the ps3 being much, much more powerful than the wii, with the 360 caught in the middle. In an attempt to have a larger potential buyer base, companies will release games on both the xbox360 and the ps3 because of their traditional control schemes, and thus won’t exceed the xbox 360s power on the ps3.

– Atmosck