OMG Nintendo.com

The Nintendo Channel went live late last week, but extenuating circumstances prevented me from getting my Wii hooked up to check it out until today. (And if you're wondering where our WiiWare coverage is, Sardius managed to get two games covered just while I was writing this!)

What the Nintendo Channel does is... kind of interesting. Basically it lets you shop for new DS and Wii games, watch promo and info videos on a variety of upcoming products for Nintendo systems, and download Nintendo DS demos for roughly a dozen or so titles. In return for these services, the Nintendo Channel wants to gather usage data from you, so if you're not the type who likes to take off your tinfoil hat, you may want to take a pass on this one.

If you're interested in a breakdown of what's available and interesting in the various aspects of the Nintendo Channel, then look no further than... uh, behind the cut for more details.

Videos

This is the page that the Nintendo Channel always drops you into after you fire it up. Right now it's about 10 pages of various promotional videos, some of them exclusive and some of them stuff you could probably just as easily watch on GameTrailers.

Now, these videos are all streaming, so the Nintendo Channel video section is really sort of a glorified Nintendo-only YouTube. Right now, with WiiWare's launch probably causing bandwidth use on the WFC to be unusually heavy, there are really severe problems with videos freezing in midstream while more downloads. Another issue that annoyus me is that the videos are all ridiculously over-compressed and look pretty grainy and lousy on my HD set.

The actual content varies wildly. Most of the third-party videos are 100% things you could just go watch online with a lot less hassle. The first-party vids are, for the most part, pretty interesting and worth tuning in for at least once... though, you may want to be a bit wiser than me and wait until non-peak usage hours to try and tune in.

I watched everything on the Nintendo Channel (no, really) and here's what I think is worth your time to check out as of this writing. If it seems like enough good vids go up, I'll keep pointing them out every so often, but I really wonder if we'll see significant amounts of quality content outside of the first party stuff. I mean, out of 50 videos, I found something like five decent ones.

• Who's Playing Wii Fit, vol. 1: Two women's soccer champs play Wii Fit and are not incredibly good at it. If you're afraid of the board making fun of you, this will make you feel a lot better about yourself.
• Defend Your Castle Trailer: Well, I guess I know what my first WiiWare buy is going to be...
• Interview with Shigeru Miyamoto: Miyamoto waxes philosophic about the creation of Wii Fit. Stuff you may have read in other interviews, but now you can hear it with hilarious dubbing and Miyamoto smiling beatifically at you.
• Wii Fit Info Video: I'm including this mostly because my husband wandered into the room while I was watching it, saw the footage of the boxing training sequences, and immediately decided we needed to have one. Try it on your favorite non-gamer and see if the results are the same.
• Professor Layton Info Video: Worth it just to see the animation at much higher resolution than the DS allows. They're doing a full Professor Layton film in this style, and I really can't wait to see it.

Find Titles For You

This is what you can do with the Nintendo Channel when you're through watching flash videos, and where most of the really interesting features lie. You can do searches to try and find new games you might be interested in for Wii or DS, add your own recommendations for games you've played at least an hour, or avail yourself of the DS Download Service and play some demos.

The way searches and recommendations work is a little... well, I'm not sure how I feel about it. You can search for titles specifically by name, just look at whatever's new, or search by category. The five categories are Platform, Publisher, Genre, Everyone's Recommendations, and Other. Searching based on recommendation gives you results based on recommendations made by other players, but you can't see exactly what those recommendations were. Other lets you specify searches for single-player or multiplayer content, online content, or "video clips" (which I guess means FMV cutscenes).

The way Recommendations work makes searching for them - and making them - feel sort of futile. Once you've selected a title to recommend (and this includes Virtual Console and WiiWare stuff), you're asked if men or women enjoyed the title in the house the most. Bwuh? I'm the only primary user of my Wii, so apparently every single thing I recommend is going to end up being a recommendation for all women everywhere.

Oh, sure, I like playing Geometry Wars and Baroque, but most ladies aren't ever going to feel the same (more's the pity). The same goes for listing your age in recommendations. You do get to use a slider to indicate how highly you recommend the game. Then you specify whether it' s a good game for "Anyone" or "Gamers", and then whether it suits a "Casual" or "Hardcore" mood, and... aren't these two distinctions basically the same thing? Then you specify whether you prefer playing it alone or with friends.

What's insane about all of this is that when you search by recommendation, you're also saddled with these insane and none-too-useful categories to use for narrowing your search down. Boy, I sure bet searching for games that appeal to "Gamers" in a "Casual" mood "With Friends" and are also 27-year-old women would return so much that I'd want to play and hadn't gotten to yet!! (Running this search right now literally returns "No titles", by the by, so I guess Nintendo believes I secretly hate games.) Seriously, this is lame, a star ranking ala Amazon with a total of all votes input would vastly more useful.

So You Want to Buy a Game

So, let's say by some miracle you use the Nintendo Channel to find a game you want. Let's say it's... oh, what the hell, Battalion Wars 2. This is a boxed title, so I can't just zip over to the Wii Shop and download it. Well, the Nintendo Channel will happily send me to a website where I can place an order instead. The product pages like this can also send you to official websites, show you trailers, and give you demos if they're available.

For Battalion Wars 2, I'll just click on that little "Purchase" bubble. This takes you to an "e-commerce site" in your Internet Channel browser that lets you pick from a variety of retailers (up to nine per game, it seems) for ordering the game online. For Battalion Wars 2, my options are Sears, K-Mart, Best Buy, Circuit City, Toys R Us, Amazon.com, Target, GameStop, and Wal-Mart.

Problem: the individual stores aren't linked correctly. Trying to visit both Sears and Kmart's Battalion Wars 2 page took me to a page selling "Hasbro Star Wars - Expanded Universe - Darth Vader and Rebel Fleet Two-Pack." There are probably similar errors for other games, although the other seven stores worked just fine. It's still off-putting and unprofessional (said the blogger typing this in her pajamas).

Another problem: let's say you look at all of the store prices and decide that you're not really all that interested in purchasing the game you're looking at right now. You'd want to go back to the Nintendo Channel search and check out your other options, right? Well, ha ha, screw you, that's not actually possible. Since the Wii doesn't support tabs, the Internet Channel window you open for purchasing overrides the Nintendo Channel window. To see other search options after going to a game's purchase screen, you appear to have to go back to the Nintendo Channel window and run the search again. Lame.

DS Demos

Ah, now this is probably the aspect of the Nintendo Channel you're most interested in, and it's only buried under three completely unrelated interface layers. Good jorb, Nintendo!

The demos themselves are worth the hassle of getting to them. Downloading from your Wii to the DS is as easy as downloading from any other DS station. Problem: Most of the actual demos aren't that good, and probably wouldn't change your mind regarding a given game.

The only exception to this was Crosswords DS, which actually had a pretty fabulous demo that completely sold me on the game. The demo for the Iron Man DS game was also way better than I expected, although the game itself was still nothing great. Still, most of the others were arbitrarily chosen mini-games or just the introduction to the full game.

I don't foresee this service becoming the big deal to DS users that demos are to Xbox 360 users until DS publishers start putting more effort into the quality of their demos... and, of course, the quality of the games. Come on, a demo for the Spiderwick Chronicles cash-in? The last thing that sort of shoddy license title needs is something that could warn gullible children away from wanting it.

Conclusion & Musings

All told, the Nintendo Channel is... not bad, I think. It could be better, of course. The shopping interface needs some tweaks before it's beyond beta status, videos need to load more smoothly/quickly, and the DS demos also need to be a lot less half-assed. It's free, so all you have to lose for downloading it is 123 precious blocks of Wii storage.

Whether this is worth it to you is honestly going to be a matter of taste. Some Nintendo fans are going to go nuts for the exclusive videos, and of course, everyone likes demos for upcoming games. Still, before it's a must-have part of the Wii experience, the content needs to be richer and the interface needs serious streamlining.

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