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Am I better than Mii?
01/09/07
by Shaw

In the past, I have pretty much totally eschewed all things involving the newest technology... In particular, unlike most men my age, video games play no part in my life. I own no video game system after the original Playstation, which I inherited from my younger brother's collection. You might think this is a function of financial futility, but really, it's just that I don't care as much. I am satisfied with playing video games at other people's houses and then leaving them behind. This year, however, I discovered the Nintendo Wii.

You might be familiar with the Wii as an abstract concept - maybe you saw the South Park episode where Cartman froze himself so he could avoid having to wait while conscious and when no one unfroze him, he woke up 1000 years in the future. Maybe you have seen the commercials with the cartoonish Japanese guys who bring Wiis into American homes and play with their entire families. If you don't have one now, you're probably SOL for at least a few weeks, since Wii consoles have been sold out for months. The only reason I got to play with one is that my friend Bob waited 5 hours in line to get one on opening day at 8am in Seattle, and then brought the machine with him when he came to the East Coast for Christmas, during which time he got everyone at two parties and a wedding addicted to the machine.

The machine's charm is not in its high-level graphics. (Remember when it was en vogue to to discuss the number of bits your machine could parse? The NES was 8 bit? The Genesis was a 16 bit machine? Still don't know what that all means.) In fact, most of the nerdy gaming websites are rife with comments about how poor the graphics on the Wii are. But the Wii has one thing that no other system has: mii. However fun it is to play bowling, tennis, golf, or boxing on the Wii, the best part is that you get to make a character to resemble yourself, and this character is your surrogate for all of the gaming applets... your mii bowls for you, swings for you, punches for you.

But, best of all, your mii looks like you.

Needless to say, when Bob brought the Wii to a party with 20 people, fully half of the time at the party was devoted to mii-making.

Shaw and Shaww

Creepily, once I developed my mii and started playing games, he started to reflect my own real life attributes. This worried me a little, so to comfort myself, I have performed a cursory analysis of our respective attributes, the results of which are tabulated below:

Uh oh.

The authors of Deadly Hippos invite all of you with a Nintendo Wii to submit photos of miis for the Deadly Hippos staff... DJ, JT, Tardio, KWo, the 27, Stretch, and Clay need to have their faces recast in video game pixellated glory. The results will be posted on DH at some point in the future... in the meantime, enjoy these photos, from a recent Celebrity mii-making contest:

Oh, and buy a Wii... and play the shit out of it.

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