Are You Getting Full Value From Your Video Games? (3 of 3)

The A,B,C Rating System

In the two previous posts in this series, I covered the idea of using achievements to figure out how much value you're getting out your Xbox 360 games, and showed how to compare your progress to that of other users. As promised, this post will bring things a little closer to home. How much value do I get from my video games?

Since getting my Xbox 360, I've been trying to be much more careful in what I buy - checking reviews, deciding whether I'm likely to actually play a given game, or whether it will just sit on my shelf. Partly this depends on how attainable the achievements are (i.e. how accessible the game content is), and partly this depends on how likely I am to play the game in question. As a rule, I don't really enjoy the traditional sports titles - even if it's the best Football/Baseball/Basketball title on the market, I probably won't get very far. And my favorite genre, best exemplified by games like Jak and Daxter or Ratchet and Clank, isn't very well represented on the 360. But I have been enjoying combat racing games, first person shooters, and a variety of other games.

After all of the previous, relatively complicated analysis, I decided to break it down to the A, B, C's. Each game I purchase is given a very simple ranking.

A: An "A" game is one which I haven't started playing yet, or I popped in and ran through the opening setup, but haven't gotten any farther.

B: A "B" game is one which I have played through for at least an hour, often more, but for one reason or another I stopped short of completing the game, or getting far enough in a game without a solid conclusion that it felt incomplete.

C: A "C" game is one which I have completed. This doesn't need to mean I'm done playing it - maybe I want to squeeze out a few more achievements, or just play more because I like it so much. But in terms of getting the core entertainment value, these ones are done.

Using this simple scale, I was able to quickly sort my games into three piles. As it turns out, I have the following ratios:
A: 38.8%
B: 27.7%
C: 33.3%

While creating this list, a few things popped out.

1. I have a lot of games I haven't started playing yet. Some of these I bought on sale, and others I just haven't gotten around to starting.

2. 33.3% completion, for me, isn't bad. I've gotten this far because I've been focusing on completing games - rather than bouncing between titles, I find it more rewarding to focus on one title, with a specific goal. I won't let myself move on to the next game until I reach that goal. Achievements are a big help in setting and tracking these goals, however you use them.

3. Of the games labelled B, the issue is occasionally one of difficulty. If I reach a point in the game where it's too hard to progress, I'm stuck. Sometimes you can get past this with the help of an online guide, like GameFAQS. Don't be ashamed to get help to move past an area where you are stuck - this is entertainment, and if you aren't having fun, you're doing it wrong.

4. Of the games labelled C, I do have a fair amount of DLC (downloadable content), which I've purchased, but not played. I should either make an effort to use that, or stop buying it.

5. I've got a bunch of games I want to play more. Looking at the games I still have to complete makes me want to go back and work on them some more. For the most part, I'm pretty happy with my collection of games.

Enough blogging about games... time to get back to playing them!

This wraps up my look at video games for the moment - I've got some more ideas related to the family of topics I've been covering recently, but if there's anything in particular you would like to see discussed, leave a note and let me know. Ideally we could have some more open discussion here, even though it's "just a blog".

Are You Getting Full Value From Your Video Games? (2 of 3)

In my last post, I described the Xbox 360 achievement system, and shared some thoughts on what works and does not work about the system. In this post, I will go over more specific examples.

My360Stats

One nice thing about the Xbox 360 is that there is an API to interact with Xbox Live (a not so nice thing is that access to this API is limited to a very small number of services). At any rate, one of these services is My360Stats. This site tracks data from a large sample of gamers. Using this data, you can learn all sorts of interesting things about how people are responding to a given game. In particular, you can see how many people are actually completing any specific game.

One of the simplest reports available is the Completed Games report. This shows what percentage of people who have played the game have earned every possible achievement. The highest completion ratio goes to Avatar, with a whopping 97.5% of users who've played the game having earned every possible achievement. Close behind is TMNT, with a 72.5% completion rate. These games are generally considered easy, since most people can beat them completely. These are the games people like to play during challenges to earn achievement points quickly - five hours of King Kong, and you've got 1,000 points for relatively little effort.

At the bottom end of the scale, we have Guitar Hero 2, with a dismal .3% completion rate (108 of 33,341). It's safe to say you are unlikely to get 100% gamerscore for this game. Let's look at this game more closely. The average completion rate (by achievements) is 46.6% (by score it's 34.9% - this is a common pattern for games which give big rewards to the hardest achievements, and is the reason I'll only be using percentages for number of achievements in the rest of this post).

If you look at the graphs for how many people have completed how many achievements, you can learn all sorts of interesting things. Looking at Guitar Hero 2, you can see a very large hump, centered around 25 achievements (the half way mark). This means that most players get to about 50% completion, and stop playing the game. What's interesting about this game is that the hump is so broad. This means there is a lot of variation about how long people play the game, well spread out. The end of the graph is always interesting - it indicates how likely you are to be able to get 100% of the points if you really try. If there's a large spike at the end, it means a good number of people who were trying for the end were able to reach it. If the end is very small, it indicates people tended to give up before getting that far. Guitar Hero 2 has a pretty small spike, so you can count on it being a hard game in this sense.

Achieve360Points

To see all the achievements, check out the site Achieve360Points.com. This lets you see all the achievements for any game, often with guides on how to get them. Note that this may include spoilers, as some games have secret achievements you are only supposed to figure out during game play - the names and goals of these achievements may give away certain elements of the game. (Unfortunately, I know of no way to determine what the success percentage is for any specific achievement - that could be an interesting number.) For Guitar Hero II there are a number of Online Mad Skillz achievements (Get 1,000,000 points on a song in Cooperative), and some other offline Mad Skillz (Earn five stars on all songs in the Expert tour). I expect these are the source of the low completion rate.

Overview of Recent Games

Some quick analyses of a few other games mentioned recently in this blog:

BioShock

Average completion: 57.4% (Only 5.85% score 100%)
My score: 94% (47 achievements)

Here I've pretty thoroughly trounced the game, and I hope to still earn the last three achievements.

Looking at the graph, we see:
9 indicates the first "give up" point.
29-31 indicates a point where some people tend to give up
43-45 means "completion" for many gamers
50 shows a nice spike, indicating %100 is reasonably possible

It's interesting to see the game abandoment happening around 9 and again at 29-31. These problem correspond to completing specific areas in the game, and losing interest.

Halo 3

Average completion: 46.9% (Only 7.08% score 100%)
My score: 24% (12 achievements)

Here I've beaten the game in co-op, but done essentially nothing else. This has only scored be a fourth of the achievements.

12 - first give up point
27-29 - second completion point
49 - big spike

Here I am, clearly at the first give up point. The second spike likely applies to playing a reasonable about of multiplayer, and 49 is probably getting most of the doable achievements - leaving the remainder as serious Mad Skillz goals.

Gears of War

Average completion: 39.1% (Only 1.56% score 100%)
My score: 12% (12 achievements)

I beat this game in co-op, and only got a meager 12% of the points. Clearly I still have work to do if I want to earn what this game has to offer. It's an awesome game, but how many times do I really want to play it?

1 indicates the first give up point. (wow)
10 indicates second Casual
23 indicates third Hardcore
30 indicates fourth Insane
48 indicates fifth (Co-op, Online Play)
relative small bump at 57, hard to complete

The give up points here map fairly well to achievements. Looks like a lot of people get stuck early one - one achievement. The other give up points seem to correspond fairly well to the difficultly levels, each of which have their own achievements. Note that the Co-op and Online Play achievements wouldn't necessarily break out exactly as shown above.

That concludes this part of my analysis - you can easily pick your own favorite games, or games you are thinking about buying, and see if you can guess where you will lie. In the next post of this series, I'll conclude with a final set of more personal observations about how much value I get out of a typical video game.

Are You Getting Full Value From Your Video Games? (1 of 3)

This is the first of many follow ups to my earlier post about the value of entertainment. Actually, noodling on this is what inspired my earlier post - I wanted to lay a basic foundation before I started digging into some of the areas more specific to video games.

So, my basic observation is this - of all the entertainment media that I personally interact with, the one format I'm most likely to not get the full value of is the videogame. What do I mean? Well, once I start watching a movie, I'll probably finish the movie (unless it's really bad). It's a relatively small investment in time. Video games, though, require heavier investments in time, and tend to have less well defined periods of play. They may also require, to be frank, some skill on the part of the person playing the video game.

Defining Completion

Some games are story-driven, and have natural arcs. These games tend to have natural conclusions to the story (even if they are open-ended to leave room for the inevitable sequel). If gamers are not following through with the story, does this mean the game was not compelling? Does this limit how likely game designers are to try to tell compelling stories? Do you have to be playing an RPG to get a story?

Other games are more gameplay driven (or focus heavily on multiplayer, for example), and may not have the same kind of natural arc. These games may have an end goal of reaching a certain skill level in the game, and often require heavy investments in time, performing the same tasks and perfecting certain skills. These are generally not the kinds of games I enjoy, even if the gameplay is otherwise excellent.

Short games can be "beaten" in 5 hours. Others may take 80 hours or more. Some games have no real notion of what "beaten" even means. I tend to favor the current trend towards games which last about 10 hours to complete the main experience. That's long enough to enjoy the basic ideas and story, but not too long to require a lot of time, especially if you don't have endless hours to sit around and play games. I like co-op games, too, since it becomes more of a way to spend time with the kids. I recently finished Halo 3 and Gears of War with my son, and that was a lot of fun - it's not clear if I would've bothered to play through those games completely if it wasn't for the co-op. I did beat BioShock by myself, though.

Measuring Achievements

So, how can you evaluate whether you are getting the full value of your games? One way is to calculate how many hours you are spending on each game, and divide the cost by the number of hours, as I did in my earlier post. Not all games will take the same amount of time to enjoy fully, though. It's also a bit of a nuisance to try and track your game playing time down to the hour.

Xbox 360 games provide an alternate means of determining completion: achievements. Each game is (typically) worth a total of 1,000 achievement points, broken down into (typically) 50 or so goals. You can rate your completion percentage either in achievement points, or simply the number of achievements earned. Looking at some sample games, I believe measuring percentage in achievements is a closer measure of the game's completion - many games tend to stack up later achievements as being worth more points, to provide a juicier reward for earning them.

I tend to broadly group achievements into four categories:

Core Game: Core game achievements occur naturally as you progress through the game. You don't need to seek these out, you just need to move forward. Typically, there is an achievement for "beating" the game, however that is defined. There may be different sets of achievements for different difficulty levels of play.

Side Quests: Side quests are achievements for things off the beaten path. In Crackdown, you can get achievements for juggling cars with explosives, or performing a variety of optional stunts. These achievements are most effective when you know about them, so you have a goal to shoot for - they encourage you to explore the game more deeply, but can be ignored by people only looking for the core experience.

Online Play: Since Xbox Live is a big part of the 360 experience, many games have achievements that specifically relate to online play. This encourages people to get online and work with (or against) other players. People who do not have online accounts are often unhappy that these achievements are effectively unreachable for them.

Mad Skillz: Basic achievements that are rewarded for particular excellence in game play. These require mastery of the game in question, and will only be earned by dedicated players.

The above categories can be combined - for example, Online Play Mad Skillz achievements may require you to win 1,000 online matches.

Different games will combine these categories in different ways. For example, King Kong has very few achievements, all of which are earned simply by playing through the game. Geometry Wars effectively only has Mad Skillz achievements - despite many attempts, I still have failed to earn a single achievement in that game.

Side Quests can either be easy (perform a specific unusual but simple task), or almost impossible (collect all 300 orbs hidden across a city). Garnering points for the latter is a task only for the OCD gamer. YouTube videos can help track down some of these. For my money, extremely difficult side quests, like collecting all of a group of hidden items, work best in combination with some way to get clues about where the items are. For example, in earlier Spyro games, you would get clues late in the game to help you find secret gems. Without these clues, or an online guide, I have very little interest in completing such quests.

Proper use of achievements can increase the entertainment value of a game by providing clues on how to play the game. Not in the sense of "move this box, to reach a higher platform", but in the sense of "try exploring different combinations of weapons", or "try playing in cooperative mode". Badly designed achievements fail to encourage or reward the player appropriately - often because they are either too easy, or too hard.

In my estimation, achievements work best when you can get approximately half of them by completing the core game, with a reasonable number of basic side quests. An additional 25% can be alloted for online play, and the final 25% divide between trickier side quests and mad skillz. For the most part, I don't care if I get %100 of the achievements for a game, but I do like to get a reasonable reward for beating the basic parts of the game.

Next up, some more detailed examples.

BioShock - Video Game Design Review

This post will review the game BioShock, by 2K Games. It's available for both PC and Xbox 360, but I only played it on the Xbox. You can learn the gritty details on Wikipedia BioShock page, which includes an astounding 122 references. Suffice it to say, the game has received amazing reviews, and it deserves them.

What I'd like to focus on in this review are some of the design elements. I'll try to stay away from any major spoilers, but depending on how picky you are, one or two small things might slip - if you are concerned about this, stay away from this review until after you have played the game.

I'll divide this review into kudos and rants. Kudos describe aspects of the game that I like, and rants describe aspects I think could use improvement.

Kudos

Style: The most outstanding aspect of BioShock for me has to be the overall presentation. The design of an underwater city with a retro theme is done just right, and the sound environment is nothing short of stunning - this is a game that demands to be listened to with the volume turned up. Little audio diaries with nice voice work fill in the back story as the game progresses, helping you experience life in this foreign environment.

Pacing: I prefer games with lots of variety - I like to keep getting exposed to new and interesting environments or game play elements, and I don't like getting hung up on overly complicated boss battles. BioShock provides a number of disturbing and interesting areas to explore - from power facilities, to research labs, to apartment buildings complete with bathrooms. For most battles in the game, you can die with almost no penalty, getting brought back to life in a convenient resurrection chamber. This lets you slowly whittle down any tough enemies even if you are low on resources. No doubt some people who prefer more challenging gameplay will dislike this feature, but it suits me fine. I want to see what happens next, not spend two hours trying to get the button press timings right to unlock the next area.

There are a few sub-features within BioShock - hacking machines to control them, or photographing enemies to research their weaknesses. In these cases, as you progress far enough in the game, the sub-features disappear right around the area where they might otherwise become boring. I think the hacking worked out about right for me, but I could have done without the last bit of completing my research. These items are optional, but I liked how they naturally faded away as a game element, instead of being forced on you to the end of the game.

Another clever trick involves the use of upgrades. There are effectively two different economic systems in the game - Cash and Adam. Cash can be used to buy ammunition and medical supplies, while Adam is only used to upgrade your character. I like this separation because there's no anxiety about having to save your money for character upgrades, or worrying about trade-offs between ammunition and upgrades. Similarly you have four separate areas of active genetic upgrades - these could have been combined into a single track, but the existing separation encourages players to explore the different areas of the game: Combat, Engineering, and Physical prowess.

Rants

The rants are fairly minor issues - by the time the game ended, though, I did come up with a few issues worth noting.

Money Cap: Limiting resources is one option to control game play and encourage exploration. For example, the different weapons have fixed ammunition limits. So when the Shotgun goes empty, you will tend to use a different weapon. If there were no caps, you might be inclined to stick with your favorite weapon. For the ammunition, this works ok. However, the money is arbitrarily stuck at $500 (especially arbitrary as the money uses four display digits, so it caps at "0500"). I suppose this is to prevent the game from becoming too easy, but it seems very artificial, and just annoyed me any time I hit that cap, as I hated leaving money lying around that I couldn't use. Another cap is on the number of parts you can collect to invent new items - the problem here is that the distribution seemed skewed somehow. I'd have tons of one item which I couldn't use without another item that was scarce. Then I couldn't pick up more of the abundant but unusable items - not a big deal, just a bit odd. Another minor nit (maybe I missed something) - when inventing items, you aren't shown how many you have in stock. So it's possible to invent items which you can't carry, wasting your supplies. Figuring out exactly how many more you need is a hassle, and pulls you out of the game.

Button Mappings: For the most part, the controls work fine. In two instances, they did not. The A button is used to both activate items, and to play audio recordings (by holding down the A button). So sometimes I would hold the A button to hear a diary, but instead an item would have popped into view and get used instead. Since some of the items have negative effects, or get consumed when you use them, this was annoying. Similarly the X button is used to both reload (which can consume your genetic resources), or to initiate hacking. While hacking security bots, the X action often toggles as things move around, and it's easy to get the wrong action to occur.

Dominant Strategies: This one's in the eye of the beholder more so than the others. A lot of the depth of the game lies in exploring the different genetic modifications. However, I didn't care as much about some of the options which seemed clearly inferior in terms of beating enemies than some of the core attacks. There was, to me, insufficient motivation to explore how all the different plasmids worked - I'd try them once or twice, and lose interest. This extends even to the later weapons, which I appreciated for variety, but didn't seem to have useful advantages over the early weapons.

User Interface: One very minor issue - at some points you can travel between areas using a public transportation system. Areas you haven't been to yet are left blank, as is the area you are currently in. This caused some confusion, as it wasn't apparent that's what it meant. It would be better to show the current area in gray, possible with some kind of "You Are Here" marker. This is supposed to be a public transportation system after all.

Downloadable Content

At the time of this review, there are 100 unreachable achievement points for BioShock. These were enabled about two weeks ago, which typically indicates upcoming DLC (downloadable content). Searching the web I found an interview with the game's creator, Ken Levine, discussing possibilities for DLC. Based on that, it sounds like the additions will focus on extra reasons to play the game a second or third time, rather than the usual standbys of new levels. I'm looking forward to seeing what they come up with, although I expect it will be more along the lines of some of the extra features which I didn't fully engage with.

Achieving the Metagame

Last night I crossed 5,000 Gamerscore, working my way through the amazing Xbox 360 game, Bioshock. This reminds me of the Xbox Rewards program I wrote about back in February.

The challenge was to get 1,500 points in 2 months, in exchange for various prizes. I had a lot of fun working for that goal - I finished it a couple weeks early, and eventually got my free stuff (a download of Contra, and some other minor bits). Here's my digital proof:

However, somewhere along the way, something was lost in the games themselves - I went too far towards focusing on achievements, and less on enjoying the games.

It's not all bad, I did spend some time on some of the games I probably wouldn't have otherwise, but at the end of the goal, I sort of burned out for awhile, and mostly stopped playing with the 360. (This is the point where my Xbox started getting mad at me, according to its blog.) It took quite a few months before I started again, but now I try to keep a better balance between achievements (which I still think are awesome), and just kicking back and having fun.

I've got more thoughts on this, which I hope I'll have time to write about in this blog, but I wonder if I'm the only one who "burned out" on the challenge - I haven't seen any new updates to the rewards program since that first challenge. Or maybe they were disappointed by the negative feedback that came in as a result of the rewards site being frequently inaccessible during the launch period, as they received much higher traffic than anticipated.

If there is a new challenge, will I try to participate? You bet - but this time I'll try to keep a closer eye on how I'm playing the metagame.

First Experiences with the PlayStation Store

So, I read online in a few places that Sony had finally opened up their store to PC's. Up to now, if you wanted to buy online content for your PSP, you needed to own a PS3. Which I suppose was supposed to encourage people to buy PS3's, but just made this consumer more cranky.

Anyways, no small amount of Googling or search found the store... amazing how many articles say it's online, but provide no link. Well, here it is: http://store.playstation.com.

Creating an account was a rather long proces, more than a dozen steps, including a CAPTCHA/email loop halfway through. At least the opt-in to spam was disabled by default, and my gamer id from Xbox was available.

At the end, I was stuck with a "Thank you for registering" page, with nary a single link - retype the URL for you, my friend. Seriously, did they do any user testing?

Anyways, since I'm on a Mac, I expect a few extra difficulties, since their app is PC only, and Parallels is still allegedly a bit dodgy under Leopard. In any case, I can't seem to find any "must-have" downloads yet after all - the really good PSOne games I bought back when they were new, so I guess I'm looking for any hidden gems I missed back in the day, which are still reasonably playable on the PSP.

If you've played with the PlayStation Store, and have recommendations on what's worth buying, let me know in the comments.

More Xbox 360 Love

Here's a few more reasons why I'm really enjoying my Xbox 360, and have more or less stopped using my other game systems (for now). I won't repeat stuff I've already raved about earlier, except as introduction to related topics.

Xbox Rewards - Earlier I mentioned how cool achievements and gamerscores are. Well, even if Nintendo and Sony haven't figured it out yet, the Xbox team does, and they're ready to crank it up a notch. First, they're adding the possibility of connecting achievement points to downloadable content, so if you buy some extra levels for a game, they can come with extra achievements. While some people see this as a way to force people to pay more for games, I think it's a great chance to extend a game after release.

A brief digression... while I do see the danger inherent in for-pay downloads, I think the possibilities outweigh them. If a publisher develops a full game, then breaks it into a high-priced "core" and makes you pay for the rest, this can artificially inflate the price of the product. The market needs to respond negatively to such tactics. Adding extra content after the core game has been released is just cool, though. PSP's Wipeout Pure did a fantastic job of adding tons of content (for free, which is even cooler), but this hasn't really taken off on in general yet.

Back to achievements, another new innovation on Xbox is the Xbox Rewards site. This is creating meta-challenges outside the game - goals related to gamerscores in general and not just specific games. The first "challenge" is to get 1500 points in 2 months for some fairly minor prizes, and the launch was, well, horrible - saturated traffic, cranky users, the works. I'm grading this one on potential, though, and I think it's huge.

Xbox 360 Mashups - The Xbox exposes information about my last several games played through an open API, which includes what I've played, how long I've played, and what achievements or scores I've gotten. This is a totally cool thing to do, which allows other sites and projects to build without needing Microsoft's direct involvement. This is an area which is still growing, but already includes cool sites like MyGamerCard, My360Stats, and others. You can set up your own stats reports to compare your scores with your friends, and this is just the beginning. Whichs leads to my current favorite...

My Xbox 360 Blogs - Yes, that's right. My 360 has started its own blog where it encourages me, criticises me, rewards me with special badges, or just plain acts snarky. Soon I'll be able to add comments to my 360's blog, although it may be awhile before it can start reading them. For more info, there's a spiffy article on blogjects, which is way more fun word than Web 2.0

Do Sony and Nintendo have some catching up to do? Oh yeah...

BTW, if you have an Xbox, I recommend the Gamerscore blog as an interesting source of news.

Somewhere down the road, I'll need to find time to complain about my Zune, lest I be criticized of becoming a Microsoft fanboy. And don't even get me started about Vista...

More Fiidback

So, we got a few more people around to play with the Wii - taking turns because we haven't found any extra controllers. Some representative comments (not mine).

• "This looks like something from 10 years ago."
• "Why didn't they finish the game?"

The latter alludes to the Wii Sports game shipped with the console. The little dudes, which are already the simple "booger" design, don't have any arms. And in some of the games, no legs or feet either. (They do in the Mii design window, so if it was a design consideration, it wasn't applied consistently.) And although they're 3d models, sometimes they look 2d. Etc etc. When you hit the ball in the baseball game, the runners don't even bother getting off home plate unless they actually get on base. The catchers don't bother to throw the ball to get an out, the result is just reported.

The bigger problem, though, is certainly the control. As described in The Design of Everyday Things, the key factor in people learning how to use controls is feedback - you need to know why things onscreen happen in response to what you're doing. For the Wiimote, such feedback is woefully in short supply. Lacking that, it takes a while to figure out how to adapt to what the system expect.

For instance, when bowling, the ball does some extra spinning to the left. Why? Is it the tilt of the controller? The spin? It's hard to do controlled experiments to figure out exactly which aspect of your motion is affecting what. Same thing for pitches in the baseball game - what exactly differentiates a screw ball from a curveball when you're wiggling the controller?

Also, inherent to trying to map the position of the controller to the game play are some real fundamental problems. Watching someone playing Boxing and comparing their movements to those onscreen is an pretty jarring. Presumably as you learn how fast the game can track, and what they can tell you are doing, you can keep it in sync better. This was also an issue with the EyeToy games, but those weren't the default, integral controller for an entire console.

Another flaw, at least with Wii Sports, is the limited control altogether. Since you're waving the magic wand, that limits what effect you can have. In Tennis, you swing the racket, but all player positions are computer controlled (including yours). Running/catching in baseball is all computer controlled, you just throw or hit the ball. In general, there's not much you can do.

And the continued safety warning screens, plug in the extra controller, now unplug the extra controller (some games use the Nunchuck attachment, and some games require it be disconnected, for safety presumably), all become an exercise in obeying the system. In a peculiar way, it's reminds me of those old Choose Your Own Adventure books, or Dragon's Lair, with simple branching points.

The best advice from the game: "Why don't you take a break and do something else for awhile?" Thank you Wii. Thii.

Glii or Flii?

I just picked up a new Wii from Nintendo today. First impressions? Well, rather than playing with it, I'm blogging about it - I suppose that should say something.

Rather than jumping into the games, of course, I did the geek thing and started installing system updates, entering wireless passwords, connecting to their store, linking my Ninteno account, and generally setting up shop. Their internet browser? Coming soon... News and Weather channels? Says I need to upgrade, then tells me I'm already up to date when I try. Maybe another day.

First stop after all that is to create a Mii - a tiny little avatar. Sadly, these little boogers have less personality than the much more enticing WeeMees. Oh well, they seem somehow linked to save files, so I'll make an ugly ol' version of me for now.

Next up, a little tennis maybe. After flailing around with the remote and a few rounds, time to calm down the dog, who seems to think I'm having a stroke. Overall impression... eh. The online stuff is so poor compared to my 360 it's not even funny. The account managment/security for multiple users, more or less nonexistant (and the parental locking is uber clumsy). To be clear, all I'm after is making sure my young 'uns don't accidentally nuke my files, charge my credit card, that sort of stuff. Handled slicker than a greased pig on the Xbox. Kludgy ick on the Wii.

Well, although it feels like I've stepped back a couple years in gaming rather than forward, I still have hopes for some of the first party Nintendo games. Next up will be Zelda. That is, if I don't just party on with the Xbox.