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Nintendo Wii appeals to nongamer

Nintendo Wii appeals to nongamer

I've been watching my kids play computer games for years. From the first time they saw Mario on their Nintendo system, they were mesmerized. Way back then I was underwhelmed.

Other adults got into the Nintendo kick. They would sit for hours racing through mazes of imaginary characters, picking up various coins and points, and meeting certain death along the way (animated death, that is).

As the games got more sophisticated, we saw more intricate worlds, 3D navigation, better resolution and more colors. But the games were still basically the same -- and I didn't particularly care for them. I always thought it was because I spend so much time on a computer for work that spending additional time on the system didn't appeal to me.

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Then, a few months ago, we decided to purchase a Wii, the latest gaming system from Nintendo. For the first time, I want to play computer games with my kids instead of railing at them about how they're spending too much time in front of the screen. After a long work day, I might even pick up the Wii controller to play a game.

The trick was that the Wii got me active. It came with the standard sports games, including bowling, baseball, tennis and boxing -- each of which requiring the participant to do more than sit on the couch twiddling thumbs or running through mazes with left and right cursor controls to pick up coins. I'm not sure whether there is any exercise value in the Wii games, but it seems like there is, because we're active, throwing our arms around.

I caught the Wii bug -- even going so far as to suggest that we might buy the Wii Fit, an expensive pad on which you can stand for more gaming excitement and which expands the physical experience of the Wii game console for yoga, balance and more mature games and exercises.

This brought up my next big idea: to rent Wii games at the local video store to see what other great physical games we might want to buy. That's what brought me to my epiphany about computer games -- because the first rental game was "Mario Party" for my youngest daughter.

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She loved it immediately; so the next morning, I asked her if I could play with her. It took several minutes to set it up and we started playing a multiplayer game from that title. From the start, I hated it. It turned our wonderful Wii into the type of game that I had been avoiding for years. We had to take turns moving along an animated path, catching coins and gaining points -- just like in the older Nintendo platforms.

There are many people who like these types of games. I'm just not one of them. But the thing that bothered me the most: To play a two-person game, we had to take turns with two additional characters that were controlled by the computer. We had to wait for each other and two people who weren't even playing to take our turns -- just taking up our valuable playing time. Computer games should be smart enough to not include two fictional players who use up half of the available playing time.

First Published: March 8, 2009, 5:00 a.m.

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