E3 2006: Hands on with Nintendo's Wii and new Dell Designs

The Nintendo Wii

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One of the main things everyone is looking forward to seeing this year is the Nintendo Wii. At Nintendo's booth, all we were able to see was the Nintendo DS at first glance but upon closer inspection, Nintendo had placed a barrier surrounding about half of its booth, reaching a good twelve to fifteen feet high. After waiting in an approximately two and a half hour line, we finally had access to the rest of the Nintendo booth. We found an entire setup of about 100 Wii stations with various games loaded. All the games we saw were full production games except for the last three which were still in development.

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Like many people, when we first heard about the unique controller Nintendo developed, we had our doubts. However, we had a chance to play around with the Nintendo Wii and our impression has completely changed. We found the controller to be incredibly easy to use. Although the controller was little too sensitive to the motions you make, it's something you get used to the more you use it.

While the main controller is a remote-like device, there are three other types of controllers, namely, the Zapper, the Nunchuk and the Classic. The Zapper is currently a work in progress to be used for the Duckhunt remake, the Nunchuk is used for, from what we saw, football games, and the Classic style controller is designed to be used for NES, SNES and N64 games. There is no initial price tag or specs, although the specs aren't out to impress anyone anyhow. The expected launch date is sometime in November.

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The way the remote-like controller works is via an infrared sensor bar which is wired directly to the Wii and can be placed either on top of or below the television. The bar can be placed anywhere as long as the controller is pointing towards it. Some adhesive backing is used to apply the sensor bar.

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Update: If you'd like to see a couple videos of Wii in action, we've created a BitTorrent share of the demonstration. The first shows a couple people playing tennis with the new controller, and the second shows a guy with two controls using them as drumsticks. If you want more information about how to use BitTorrent, here's a quick tutorial. We're using Azureus to host the file, which requires the Java JRE. (E-mail Jarred if you have problems.)