Wii Face and Other Silliness

Wii Face, originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

It's been a frenetic weekend and Monday. I worked Saturday (again) as progress on HPatOotP has been like wading through treacle in heavy boots recently. Fortunately I was able to finish by about 5 p.m. and head home to cook T some stuffed peppers for dinner.

Sunday was much better. We went to London Zoo. I cannot remember the last time I went to a zoo. I must have been pretty small though as I have only the faintest memory. In the manner of all good spiritual five year olds you have to choose favourite animals regardless of their endangeredness or whatever. I like the penguins (obviously), the tigers, the tapir, the giraffes and all the monkeys especially the golden lion tamarins, which have small grumpy faces somewhat akin to a pug.

Yesterday I wanted to give Jeff Bezos a big, wet kiss. T and I decided to get ourselves a Wii as our Christmas present to ourselves. Amazon had said that delivery would be on or around the 16th December as despite getting up early and going as fast as I could through the pre-order fiasco I missed the first delivery so launch day came and went with no Wii. Monday didn't. T received the games in the morning, which was clearly some sort of tease to get us even more excited and then upon returning from a meeting mid-afternoon there was a large Amazon box waiting on my desk. I almost burst with excitement, then I showed T and she almost burst with excitement, then as news of our arrival spread around the studio there were other pockets of explosive excitement, tinged with jealousy.

Upon getting it home we played Rayman Raving Rabbids and the Wii Sports. It became really obvious very quickly what a superb little machine it is. It's so socially driven. You wave the remotes you can see me holding around to perform actions in the games so it's immediately more expressive and physical than your typical console and it encourages people to join in. Sisoftroos also partook of the merriment and collectively we had hysterical fun, throwing cows, playing bowling, dancing with rabbits, filling rabbit's snorkels with carrot juice (natch) and so on. I think this console is going to be huge, it encourages non-hardcore gamers to play, and that's the key, it allows everyone to play, not just spotty fifteen year old boys (both actual and spiritual).