Last Friday, being the official launch day for the Wii in the UK, naturally led to a pod of Nintendo fanboys descending on Oxford St for the big launch. For the first time in my life, I was so anticipating the the launch of the new console that I took unprecedented steps to cement my fanboy credentials: I went to the midnight launch, I preordered from TWO different outlets and I took the Friday off work to wallow in a sea of beanbags, wiimotes and zelda.

And its a beauty. Its tiny, unassuming and of an entirely different aesthetic to its cousins. Taking the DS tenets of design and running with it, its exceptionally simple to use and packed with subtle features to make the setup simple and provide the basic features that most of the target audience will need.

The first thing that really struck me after powering up was the wiimote, and in particular the way that they have implemented rumble when used in conjunction with the system software. Whenever you roll over a button with the wiimote, it makes a subtle vibrating pulse. Its a simple inclusion, but hugely powerful, and significantly increases (and solidifies) your sense of connection between the screen and the wiimote. Its inclusion really does suggest that the move to drop rumble from the PS3′s SIXAXIS controller was a distinctly unsound one. Without it, it could feel like quite a loose connection between the screen and wiimote – the controller does not point like a light gun (which you might assume when first using it) but simply uses relative movement to determine position. It takes a while to adjust to this method – there really isnt another like it. Nintendo has wisely decided to pack in Wii Play with an extra controller – a series of minigames designed to familiarise the player with different styes of wiimote interaction that games will expect you to be familiar with. While some of these games are very simple (such as a where’s wally style game), some of them are wonderful (fishing and laser hockey) and really do illustrate what the wiimote will offer in the coming months.

Another standout factor of the system software is the Mii channel. This area lets you create avatars to represent you, your family and your friends. These can then be added to emails (wiimails?) sent from the message centre, and more significantly can be used to represent you within compatible games. At the moment this is limited to Wii Sports (included with the wii) and Wii play. Offering a reasonable number of possible elements (but not really enough to offer a really personalisable avatar), the novelty of watching yourself bowling or playing golf is certainly fun. The real joy, however, comes when you can interact with other wii owners – if you allow them to travel, you will see them wandering in and out of friends’ ‘Mii Parade’ randomly, and you can bring them over to play in your games. This is clearly something that Nintendo plan to use extensively so it will be interesting to watch where this goes.

The game that has been absorbing most of my time, is quite obviously the new Zelda – writeup coming soon.