What you get with a Wii
First off, let’s have a quick rundown of what’s going on inside the Wii. The slot-loading drawer will take standard sized single and dual layer discs as well as the 8cm GameCube disks, meaning your back catalogue of games shouldn’t be consigned to the bin just yet. And speaking of back catalogues, the Wii software includes a set of emulators called Virtual Console, that will allow you to play downloaded titles for older Nintendo consoles. You’ll be able to relive the sun of NES, SNES and N64 games as well as a range of Sega Genesis and TurboGrafx games too.
Powering the Wii is the Broadway PowerPC CPU, which is backed up by ATI’s Hollywood graphics chip. In addition to this there’s 512 meg of flash memory, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth along with 2 USB 2.0 ports, an SD card slot and ports for 4 GameCube controllers and 2 GameCube memory cards. With something so compact, you’ve got to wonder where they fit it all in!
Round the back is where the 2 USB 2.0 ports are located, along with the power socket and mulit-AV out which supports component, composite and S-Video outputs. And that, is it.
Click for larger imageAnd in being so simplistic lies the key to what makes the Wii such a stunning piece of kit. As we’ve seen in the past, Nintendo have gone their own way and rather than make more complex consoles, they’ve instead decided to add in as much functionality and legacy compatibility as possible whilst at the same time keep things as simple as possible.
This ties in with where Nintendo are aiming the Wii, which is not at the hardcore gamer. The hardcore gamer doesn’t need to aimed at, he or she will come running anyway. No, it looks like Nintendo are going after the casual gamer and, in their words, the lapsed gamer. They want to get the Wii into homes that maybe had a SNES ages ago, or perhaps have never had a console at all. That’s not to say that the Wii won’t deliver to us seasoned gamers, far from it in fact, but if Nintendo pitches the Wii properly, they’ll be hitting a market that the Xbox 360 and PS3 will have overlooked.
