About two weeks ago, when I was checking out my Flickr Stats, which I do everyday because I’m obsessed with the line graph, I happened to see that one of my pictures had 50 views that day. 50 might not sound like a lot for most other Flickr users, but for me 50 is a HUGE amount of views of one picture in a day. I went to see what site the views were coming from and it told me they were coming from the bbc.co.uk website.

Now I thought this we very weird, because the BBC is a big company and why on earth would I be getting clicks from there. I went a little deeper and found it on the BBC Internet Blog on a post about the BBC’s iPlayer for the Nintendo Wii. The odd thing was, my picture, which is of an S-Video port on my laptop, had nothing to do with the Wii. I read through the post and saw that the author was talking about watching shows from your computer on your TV. I thought it was a little weird that my picture got chosen but looking at other first page results from an S-Video search on Flickr, I can see why mine was picked over the others, I just don’t know why a more suitable picture wasn’t chosen.

Well today, the picture made it into my top 10 most viewed pictures on my Flickr photostream. I’m pretty happy my picture got used on the blog site and generated hundreds of views of that picture, but I don’t really care that much. Its nice to have you picture on some biggish website for everyone to see, as long as the picture isn’t crap or humiliating. This is a win for me

I had the fortunate opportunity to have access to Nintendo’s next generation console, the Wii. My neighbour bought one. You know the advertisements where you see the older people playing it and you think “Yeah Right!”, well my neighbour is in that age bracket and she bought one for herself (and a nice HDTV to go with it. ) Anyway, I set it all up and have been playing it today and yesterday.

My first impressions were good, I enjoyed it a lot. I only had access to the two games that come with it, well technically the game that came with it, Wii Sports, and the game that came with the Wiimote, Wii Play. Wii Sports was a lot of fun. Tennis was cool but it was weird. The ball went in places that any normal person wouldn’t hit it, so the controls on that are a little janky. Baseball was very difficult. I did get the hang of it eventually but someone without persistence could get frustrated very easily and dislike the game. Once you get it right, it is good. Bowling was by far my favourite. It was awesome playing two or three player, the competitiveness was just what the game needed to make it fun. Single player bowling just isn’t the same. Golf was okay but the controls were a little difficult, that’s really all I have to say about it. Boxing was definitely the most energetic one. I really worked up a sweat after a few games of it. Wii Play is a great game to introduce you to the Wii and I think it was a good move to include it with the console.

Wii Play is bad. To be honest, all it really is, is a tutorial on how to use the Wiimote. Most of the games on it are crap and it is stupid you have to play all the games to unlock them all. The only games really worth mentioning from this are the fishing game, billiards and the game with the cow (don’t ask.) The fishing game is what you would expect it to be like, you pull up when you get a bite. This game is a little annoying when you have two people playing because when one person pulls up a fish, it ruins your fishing. Billiards is the best thing on the disc, it is billiards. Not much more to say about that one. The random cow game is a racing game where you knock things over and collect points. You have the controller horizontal and steer it. You lift the controller for jump and tilt it forward to make the animal go faster. It was a cool game and I with it lasted a little longer.

All in all my Wiiperience was great. I enjoyed it and wish I had the opportunity to try out more game, some decent titles, to see what this thing is really made of. At the moment I still agree with it being a fad and I am a little bored of it already. I am sure there are people in the same boat as me, and there will be people who disagree. I am glad I got to play with the Wii, although I am not so glad with the sore arm it gave me, haha.