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Nintendo Wii: Gaming for the Masses?

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Does Nintendo succeed with its ambitious goal of bringing gaming to the masses? What better time than Thanksgiving to find out!

The Wii: Gaming for the Masses?

Thanksgiving is a time for feasts, for giving thanks, and most importantly for the sake of this article, family togetherness. So I went to my friend’s house for Thanksgiving with an empty stomach as well as my newly acquired Nintendo Wii in a bag slung across my shoulder. My objective was simple: Eat tons of food, mingle with family and friends, and then put the Wii to the test by having non gamers play it and see whether or not Nintendo really succeeded in making gaming enjoyable for people of all ages and gaming backgrounds.

I figured that the best game to test this would obviously be the only game that came packaged in with the Wii: Wii Sports. Wii Sports is a package consisting of five simple, yet surprisingly fun sports games that includes tennis, baseball, golf, boxing, and bowling. The simple nature of the games along with the very unintimidating look of the remote made it fairly easy to gather a crowd of four people that wanted to play the game. Lucky for me, these four people came from all ends of the non gamer spectrum. We had my best friend’s dad, brother, little sister, and my own dad to make up the test subjects for this little experiment. Since we didn’t actually have the time to go through each and every game on the package, I narrowed it down to the two sports that I thought were the most fun; Tennis and bowling.

It doesn't matter if you're 9 or 99, Tennis is fun for the whole family.

Tennis

Tennis was probably the biggest hit of the night as people could not seem to put the controllers down and even lamented having to give them up to let another person try it out. The youngest of the group, my best friend’s ten year old little sister, had this to say when asked what she thought of Wii Tennis: “It was really cool how you can actually feel how you were playing the game. If you wanted to be a real tennis player you could actually practice through playing the game.”

The real test though was my best friend’s dad who actually is a very experienced tennis player in real life and has never really been able to get into video games. Surprisingly however, he was actually the most vocal about how amazing he thought the game was and kept saying “Incredible” out loud throughout his playtime with the game. When asked what he thought of Wii Tennis in particular, he said, “(Wii Tennis was) Very good, the characters were kind of childish, but other than that the game itself, the controls, the interactions were incredible.” When asked if he would be interested in buying a game that had more realistic players and a more in depth control scheme, he replied with a confident “Definitely.”

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