As a kid, my brother and I were the exceptions when it came to video gaming. While not many in our town would have even heard of Video gaming of any sort we did rent the NES spinoff consoles for a day for a fee of 50-100 Rs (1 or 2$) back in the nineties. The games that I remember fondly are

• Battle City
• Super Mario Bros
• Mappy
• Lode Runner
• Road Fighter
  
• Popeye
  
• Legend of Zelda
• Arachnoid and a few more

It would take a lot of effort on our part to convince our dad for another day of video gaming. The fact was that my father was equally enjoying the video gaming sessions albeit with a guilt of making his sons addictive in the process. Another game that I liked was 'Prince of Persia' which I completed in a couple of days (most of the time it is like eat, play game, eat, sleep) on a monochrome 14" monitor running on a poor processor with the ability to read big floppy disks (5 1/4").

I loved playing video games a lot even when it was widely considered childish by people around me. It is difficult to convince such stereotyped people and I just wish that someday they end up playing a game to realize that there was nothing childish about it and some games require quite some use of your grey matter.

Finally we ventured and got a home console in mid nineties for which my father paid 1500 Rs (approx 30$) which was huge for us those days and many considered us crazy.

Now, keeping up with the tradition, I have done a similar thing buying Wii for 12500 Rs (250$) which many here would call as a crazy thing to do. I had grown up wondering how it would be if there could be a bat in our hand and we could play cricket with it in the virtual pitch. I had another big dream of someday being able to play games like 'Prince of Persia' again in virtual world where we would have to jump, catch and fight with a sword and feel a bit of rumble / pain when the opponent attacks us. Nintendo made my former dream come true with their Wii - rather our Wii.

The Console

Wii with its motion sensor stands out apart from the other more traditional gaming consoles like XBox 360 and PS3. Here I want to make clear that I don't have anything against these other consoles or those who have and play them. I like Wii and will speak only about that. It is so much fun especially when grown ups jump up and down to hit a volley in a tennis match or you feel admist the action with your gun in Resident Evil 4. The fun gets better when you fight against each other in boxing and plan a co-operative structure in 'World of Goo'.

Wii comes at 250$ and at this price you can't go wrong. It has some quality and unique titles and a lot of throwaway games. So you have to be a bit more careful when it comes to choosing your games. The console comes Wifi ready and with support to SDHC cards (upto 32GB at this time of writing). You have a wiimote and a nunchuk as standard peripherals where wiimote handles pointing and shooting while nunchuk is more for moving you character around (not required for many games). It comes bundled with 'Wii sports' with Tennis being the major attraction.

What to buy?

• Of course buy the Nintendo Console (comes with 1 wiimote, 1 nunchuk and Wii sports
• Buy an extra wiimote (Best is to buy 'Wii Play' game which comes bundled with a wiimote.
• But an extra nunchuk
• Games to buy
  • Super Mario Galaxy (3D platformer)
    
  • Resident Evil 4 (Survival Horror)
    
  • Boom Blox (Fun)
    
  • De Blob (Fun)
  • Metroid Prime 3 corruption (First person shooter)
    
  • Super Smash Bros - Brawl (Fight)
    
  • Legend of Zelda - Twilight Princess (Role Playing)
    
  • Mario Wii Kart (Racing)
• 2 pairs of good rechargeable AA batteries (2500mAh or more)
• 1 AA recharger

Virtual Console

Let me be frank with you. I play a lot of these than the actual Wii games. What are these? They are the original NES/SNES/N64 titles available for download through nintendo's Shop channel. You can buy them using Wii points (Got by purchasing using credit card on the same Shop channel or through Wii points card). I still very much enjoy playing 'Super Mario Bros' and 'Legend of Zelda' and there are some awesome titles like 'Ocarina of Time' for you to relish.

Wiiware

Another compelling reason to get your Nintedo hooked up to Wifi and get yourself some Wii points. These are brand new titles available for download (costing 500-1500 points). Btw you can get 100 points for 1$. The best so far are 'World of Goo', Lost winds, tetris party and 'Toki Tori'.

Wii in India

Wii has been officially launched in India for a steep price of close to 20k for the basic console alone. But this was after I got it from US. If you are like me and have a Wii from US, don't plug it in directly in our 220V socket and burn your Wii. It needs two things

• One is a plug adaptor for the Indian Pin type from US Pin type
• Another is a transformer to convert 220V to 120V. Since Wii requires just 50 watt (it actually only uses 20W) you can buy a transformer 220 V -> 120 V 100 watt (I got one from Vishal Transformers in SP road, Bangalore for 250 watts costing 600 Rs)

You also need to know if your television supports NTSC as the Wii sold in US as well as in India supports only NTSC video. Chances are that you TV supports it since most modern TVs do (By modern I meant TVs which are of this century, though I have tested with a Onida TV made in 1995 and it worked flawlessly)