E3 06: Wii hands-on

As Nintendo's stand was still being built around us, with cranes and fork lift trucks all about,we were ushered into a back walled room secured with an anticipation raising jumbo-jet style locking mechanism for one of the world's first goes on Wii.

First things first: the controller. Smaller and shorter than it looked in the original announcement videos, we were warned that it was still a prototype design and that several games at E3 would use it connected to the Wii with a wire that wouldn't be needed with the final machine. The biggest surprise was the speaker later announced at Nintendo's press conference but other than some minor button renaming the most vital addition was probably the wrist strap - highly recommended for owners of expensive pottery and plasma screens. The two main things you'll be pressing when playing Wii are the A button on top of the controller and the B trigger underneath. The nunchuck controller, which is the final name, was also light, well made with two shoulder buttons, a smaller top button named C above the Z button. Nintendo representatives confirmed that the main controller will take two AA batteries but we'd expect a 360-style array on rechargeable options. One more thing, apparently the freehand and nunchuck can be swapped between hands so left-handers have no need to moan about this new way of playing games.

killadog36
I'm the boss