It’s arrived!   well, no, it bloody hasn’t but they’ve shipped me the games I ordered without the console, and I was actually expecting them to send them all out together.  Bah.  How frustrating!

Again with those well-aligned priorities!  I’ve spent a couple of days over the New Year — not sorting out my paperwork and cleaning like Dave Radcliffe — but spending hours and hours replaying a decade-old computer game that I haven’t touched in years.

It started well enough.  I had to tidy my room to find my P60s to complete — late! — my tax return.  I eventually found them amongst various wodges of vaguely important paperwork, but before I got there, I threw out enough cardboard to fill the recycling wheelie bin. Not enough cardboard to expose much in the way of carpet, or desk. But in doing so, I uncovered my Monkey Island Bounty Pack.  The Pack is supposed to have Monkey Island 1, 2 AND 3 in it, but I lent 1 and 2 to someone years ago (Hannah?) and so only had 3 left.

Oh, well, it was fun reliving the adventure, The Curse of Monkey Island.  Oh, the sights and sounds of the Caribbean. Caber-tossing on Plunder Island.  The lost art of insult-sword fighting. And who could forget Sherman, the lactose-intolerant volcano ably guarded by Lemonhead.

Erm.  Getting a bit carried away.  Will there be Monkey Island for Wii? Do Lucasarts still make Monkey Island-style games – their website seems to be covered in Star Wars tie-ins, and doesn’t seem to have anything like Guybrush Threepwood or Grim Fandango, or even Day of the Tentacle any more? Is the adventure game really dead?

Oh, dear, I’ve done it.  I’ve ordered Wii. I’ve taken Leigh’s advice and given my credit card details to Gameplay – a bumper order for Wii, Wii Play, Zelda and Rabbids.

At least when Leigh ordered, he had a count-down for Wii to arrive – I’ve no idea when they’ll fulfill the order!

I can’t go near my computer without googling Wii, so I know there’s going to be Linerider for Wii (???) and you can even get a Wii WordPress plugin that reformats your blog so that you can read it (and post to it?) from Wii.

Is it really wise to invest in new computer hardware and a massive drain on time so soon before the all-important local elections?  Probably not…

Someone’s trying to port Linux to the Wii!

Must… stop… thinking… about… Wii…

P has been off with friends all day, and he’s been Wiiing as well!  It’s everywhere!

Never having bought a games console before, I don’t know how you go about it when you’re in the period between the initial batch having been sold out and the next batch… arriving when?

None of the online retailers seem to be doing pre-orders at the moment, they’d all rather get you to pay over the odds on eBay or Amazon Shops.

When will the next lot be coming to the UK? How do I find out? Can I put my name down for one anywhere?

Will there be Tombraider Wii?  Will it be possible to use other people’s savegames to get you through the impossible / tedious levels?

For lo, a voice in the wilderness is calling, “Prepare ye a Wii for the Lord!”

Leigh brought his long awaited Wii with him to the party on Boxing Day to show how marvellous it is. After all the many jokes based on the name (“playing with Leigh’s Wii”, “wii-ing in the living room”, “wii-ing all over the house”) we got a fairly comprehensive tour of what Wii can do.

And it is quite impressive. Leigh is fully kitted out with Wii, Wii-motes and nunchucks coming out of his ears, Wii-branded bags, games from Sports to Zelda, so it could well be a more impressive experience than your average out-of-the-bag Wii.

First we got to check out the army of WiiMiis he has created – there was already an avatar for everyone at the party, plus most of his extended family, and a handful of Star Trek NG characters. We did get a bit of a say in improving some choices he’d made for our characters – “Why is my mouth like that?” and so on.

Then we got to play. The whole point of Wii is that you have a controller, the Wiimote, that isn’t physically connected to the machine, and is very sensitive to movement. So playing involves tweaking the bits around in hundreds of different complicated ways. It’s deliberately aimed at all sorts of people and not just the usual games console suspects. A quick look at Flickr suggests many – from old to young – are enjoying the Wii’s charms.

We all got a good go on WiiSports – I got strikes in Wii Bowling, which is more than I get in real bowling! Baseball was interesting, although I’m still not sure how you play the game. Baseball all the more interesting because although it only has two human players, it drafts in all the WiiMiis on the system to play as fielders etc. I was caught out by Worf on more than one occasion.

But WiiBoxing was the real killer. There’s a short video of two players WiiBoxing on the Wiibsite – I didn’t realise you could do it sitting down! I was boxing C, both of us with a Wiimote in one hand and a nunchuck in the other. And the various Wii moves – punches to the head, punches to the body, and defensive moves – are all designed to be similar to actually hitting people. So we got in a bit of a frenzy fighting, and it was pretty physical. I managed to keep my end up in the first round, knocking C to the ground, only to be KO’ed myself in the second. By which point I was gasping for water, wishing I’d thought to bring my inhaler, and C had to pop outside for air. Days later, and my muscles are still killing me all around my back and shoulders!

It was rather good fun, and we’re half sold on getting one ourselves. We can rationalise it in all sorts of ways, including it being good for our physical fitness! They are not all that pricey, just at the moment, they’re pretty much unobtainable except by paying well over the odds on eBay. So, in the few months before another consignment reaches these shores, we can probably manage to save up for one. And by then there will be more games for it – I’m intrigued by Animal Crossing for one.

I was just cursing a handful of naff spam comments I had to manually delete when I caught sight of this

Akismet has protected your site from 9873 spam comments.

Good grief! Thank you, Akismet!