Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2007 > January > 26 > Entry
Another reason to want a Wii
For those still hunting for the elusive Nintendo Wii, which is still nearly impossible to find on store shelves, you’ve for something to look forward to: an online news channel.
What initially sounded kinda lame — do you really want to use your Wii system as a source for news? — is actually a very tight and slick way to browse headlines between playing games on the console. The service launched this morning and is now fully functional after you download a system update.
From a “News Channel” button on the main menu, the service downloads stories from the Associated Press and then presents them by category. You point at it with your Wiimote, select Sports, National News, etc., and up come quite a few headlines, some with photos. Click on a news story and you get the complete text, photo, caption and even a map (similar to the one on the Wii Forecast channel) to the right of your screen showing where the story takes place. Once the news is downloaded, switching between stories is very speedy, with little lag that I could detect.
You can zoom in and out, changing the size of the text for readability and every time you do, the text breaks apart and reforms in a neat little bit of visual pizazz that wouldn’t look out of place on MacOS.
While you could nitpick that this was a feature that should have been ready to go by the November launch of the console, it’s still a welcome addition to what’s beginning to look like a bargain bundle at $250.
Permalink | | Categories: Internet, Videogames
