I’ve been wanting to use that headline for a while now. ;-) The Wii made the trip to North Dakota for Christmas. I wasn’t planning on taking it but then some of my cousins got wind that I had one of these prized units and suggested I bring it. It was a huge hit. The little Wii served over 9 hours of playtime on December 25th – by far the longest workout it has ever gotten.

It’s really amazing to watch people that never have any interest in video games playing a Wii and liking it so much. Wii Sports, the free “in box” game was the biggest hit of the day. The fact that it requires no experience to play, you just pick it up and go, makes it a big winner with people that are just getting acquainted with the Wii and it’s free motion controls. We even made a number of Mii’s for some of my relatives and everyone had a blast making them look as close to the person as they could.

I also scored two new games for my Wii: Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz and Red Steel. I only played a few minutes of Super Monkey Ball myself hitting a few of the party games. The game has a lot of promise. i played Red Steel for about 20 minutes and it was pretty good. I’m not a fan of most first-person shooters, but this was actually controllable and again the free motion controls made it easy to work with.

In other Wii related news I grabbed the preview of the Internet Channel for it. I was really impressed with it. First off, Nintendo did the right thing by not making their own and getting Opera to build a Wii version. Secondly, the speed is much better than I expected. I’ve always felt the “Internet” features on the Wii were really slow, but it must be something on the Nintendo side since the browser itself was very usable. It even plays flash video, making it a great YouTube surfing station.