Okay, so that was a bit of a cliffhanger. I got distracted by video games, and then went to bed.

Having my Wii console for about two weeks now, I must say overall that I am impressed. I was certainly skeptical that this system would turn out to be any good, thinking that the games would be terrible and cheesy. So far, I have been proven wrong.

While there will always be a collection of terrible games on every system, mostly movie knock-offs (Happy Feet anyone?) there is a moderate collection of good games too. Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess is one of these. A fantastic game, great story, and at a decent length, this game has everything a release title should be. Sure, the graphics are mediocre at best, but I'm a Zelda fan, so I can look over this.

Besides the games there are the Wii Channels which are the options your have when the system starts up such as, Wii Shop, Mii Channel, (make a little avatar that looks like you and is used for games like Wii Play and Wii Sports) Photo Channel, (The Wii used SD cards as memory but you can also load pictures from your digital camera), the News Channel which hasn't been released yet, the Forecast channel, which was released last Wednesday, and as of yesterday, a beta version of the internet channel.

Provided by the Opera web-browser, the internet channel is a little hard to get used to. You start out at a small options page where you can choose to look at your favorites (wii.com and Opera's home page are already set) or simply type in a web address, and I decided to test it out on rinkworks.com. The first thing I noticed was that it was fast. My laptop is fast, and this seemed fastER. So, I was very happy with that. The next thing I noticed was that everything was so small it was difficult to read, so I tried zooming in using the plus button on the wiimote. This zoomed it in too much, and I quickly realized there was only two settings, zoom out and zoom in. You couldn't control the distance by how long you held down the button, just two arbitrary settings. Navigating the page was also fairly simple. Hold down the trigger button and move the wiimote the direction you wanted to see more of. I tried a few different sites, msnbc.com, somethingawful.com, basically sites that were very graphic heavy. The Wii displayed everything perfectly. It was as if WebTV had never died!

All in all, it was a lot of fun. I will continue to use the Wii Internet channel, but it won't replace my laptop anytime soon. It will be nice say, if I want a walkthrough on a level I'm stuck on or something like that. Overall, I'd say I'm pleased with the internet channel, and I didn't run across any of the features that were not included in the beta release, but I'll keep my eyes open.

Sorry for the long post!

-TBG