11 February 2007

Things I've Learned Playing with My Wii

Though the whole interface is very well designed, there are a few things that took me a while to figure out.

  1. The address book is hard to find. You have to go to the “new message” page in the message center to get to it. Assuming this is going to be the main way that you sign up friends, which needs to be done in order to play online with people (once there are online games), the address book should be made more visible.
  2. You don’t get any notification when someone adds you as their friend. It’d be nice to get a little mail from the system once you register someone and they register you back.
  3. The first instinct you get when you see that you someone has befriended you is you send them a letter and attach a Mii. This Mii does nothing except show who sent it—you can’t pull it off the message like an attachment and add it to your Mii collection.
  4. To send a Mii to someone, you have to do it from the Mii Channel. Once in there it’s pretty obvious as there’s a little mail icon, but the fact that you can’t do this from the message center seems odd.
  5. Your Miis seem to be able to populate other people’s Mii Parades on their own without you explicitly sending them, but only if you first go into Mii Parade and enable the travel setting and set each individual Mii to mingle in the editor.
  6. My camera’s too old to use SD cards, so I can’t use the cool picture editor.
  7. You can register your email address as a friend. When you do, it sends you an email, and you can then send stuff to that address and it’ll show up in your system, which could be useful for sending yourself reminders of things to do when you get home.
  8. When you get a new message, the glowing blue light is very tantalizing.
  9. The Forecast Channel seems to check the weather two or three times a day. This should be increased to at least every other hour. Otherwise I like the presentation a lot.
  10. glynnenstein is tricky to capture in Mii form. “Tall with short light hair” is the best we could do.