The Wii is not a Kid System

Sure, the Wii has lots of games that are family friendly and kid friendly, and I'm sure it is safe to say that it has more family games than the Xbox360 and PS3. however, that does not make it a kid system. You know what I played on the Wii last night? Call of Duty: Black Ops. It's rated M, if you're keeping score, which is not the rating you drop on a kid's game. It's actually a fairly difficult game too. Know why? Has to do with how you aim the gun.

If I were playing this game on the Xbox, I would be using the dual stick controller to both look around and move and aim. I've played Xbox games. In fact, after playing Halo on the original Xbox, I reconfigured Metroid Prime (which I still believe is the best first person shooter there is) on the GameCube to mimic those controls. Perfect FPS setup. Come to think of it, Metroid Prime on the GameCube was easier than it is on the Wii. Oh, yeah, they redid the game for the Wii to incorporate that pesky Wii remote. You know, the device that set the Wii apart from it's competitors and catapulted it to the top of everyone's game? Now you have to aim with your hand and arm instead of a couple of control sticks.

The Xbox and especially the PS3 both have exceptional graphics. I'm not going to pull any punches there. The visuals on those systems are a sight to behold and without argument, they both possess superior system hardware. Thing is that while Microsoft and Sony upgraded their graphics (and that's it, by the way - their controllers were pretty much identical to their predecessors), Nintendo kept the same engine that the GameCube had (that's right, the Wii has the GameCube's guts), but revolutionized HOW you play the games instead. That little aiming deal you can do with the Wii remote makes the Wii the ultimate first person shooter game system. What better way to aim a gun than to hold the gun in your hand and aim it? They actually have Wii remote holders that resemble REAL guns, complete with the trigger in the right place and they're black with no silly orange barrel.

In fact, the Wii has a type of shooter game that the other systems don't (or don't have many of considering how silly the game would be). It's called a rail shooter. Think of it this way: pretend that haunted house ride at the fair where a cart takes you through the horrors of the phantasmagorical has lots of enemies popping up all over the place and you have a gun to blow them all away. But the cart keeps moving. That's a rail shooter. The game controls your movements and you control the gun, freeing you up to just blow stuff up. Some of the better rail shooters on the Wii are based on the Resident Evil and Dead Space series, all of which are M rated games complete with the blood and carnage you might expect. Still not kid's games.

I have a box full of Wii games that are not for the children or the faint of heart. Some of them are easy. Some are hard. Some require a great deal of problem solving. But I wouldn't let my kids play half of them, which is a far cry from the system that started it all for some of us, the 8-bit NES. You'd be hard pressed to find a NES or SNES game that kids shouldn't play, and those systems defined the home video game landscape.

My father-in-law thinks that if I got an Xbox, I would leave the Wii and never return. I disagree. If I had an Xbox, I would still get any FPS games on the Wii, if a Wii version exists (I'm looking at you, Modern Warfare 3), for the fun of playing the game as opposed to the superior graphics. Visuals are paramount in movies, but with video games, you have to enjoy the game first. Those beautiful visuals don't make any difference at all if the game isn't fun to play, and if I'm holding a gun on screen, it is far more immersive to hold it in my hand than to move an auto-locking reticule around the screen with a control stick.