Gaming for the Holidays

With this past weekend serving as first "official" notice that Christmas is just around the corner, we checked out a few gaming systems on Saturday. Walking around the electronics store, the first system to catch my eye was the Wii. Well, more specifically, the game that was being demo'd in-store: Disney's Epic Mickey.

I've wanted to check this out ever since I learned of the game . . . whenever that was. so I grabbed the controllers -- because the game requires both -- and stood in front of the flat screen in the store, watching about 10 minutes of story before actually being able to test the game. The graphics looked amazing, very colorful and very Disney, and then seeing Oswald sneak into the laboratory -- that was kinda cool, too. And yes, being a Disney fan, even though my rabidity has slackened over the past year, I was won over completely by what little I saw of the actual gameplay. The Wii does have some decent titles that both Caesar and I would most likely play. But the question remains: is getting a Wii simply because of a single game, the right thing to do?

The other system I tested out -- and found very exhausting due to my current lack of being in shape -- was the Kinect from Xbox. Another interesting, more involving way to play video games, the Kinect uses a camera to capture your movements and translate those into the game. So when you jump in real life, your character on the screen or in the game jumps as well. Wave your right hand, the character waves his right hand. Awesome enough to have me jumping around the floor of the electronics store for fifteen minutes. We live on the second floor of an apartment building so I don't think the game is that conducive to where we live. And I doubt our neighbor below would enjoy having us fall through his ceiling/our floor into his apartment.

Decisions. . .decisions. Does anyone out there have a wII? What are your impressions of it?

Image for Epic Mickey from Total Video Games.