Playing Wii

I've been trying to play Wii this weekend with Brandon. (Wii is the new Nintendo game console, which Brandon got for his birthday in September.) I am not good at this. Instead of the traditional Nintendo controller which was hooked directly up to the console, you have a wireless remote that has to be pointed toward a sensor. The wireless remote has 7 different buttons (keep in mind you only have 4 fingers and 1 opposable thumb on each hand) and a direction pad controller type thing. AND you can hook up a "nunchuk" to the wireless remote - it only has two buttons, but it also has a joystick thing. So you have two remotes in your hands while you attempt to play the game.

Brandon has been trying to teach me how to use the Wii remote. This is tremendously harder than it looks. It's like moving a mouse around on the television screen, but it's so sensitive and I'm so clumsy that my movements are almost toddler-like.

I've been playing one of Brandon's games where you have to shoot aliens and instead of shooting my gun, I press the button to jump. I don't even realize I'm doing this until the aliens are killing me, then I realize I've been jumping in one place the whole time. My Nintendo skills are lacking. Brandon's instructions are kind of confusing, too - he shouts, "Turn! Turn! Turn!" when I'm moving through the game and I have to say, "Which way? Which button? How am I supposed to do that?" Then the aliens kill me. And Brandon rolls his eyes at my ineptness.

I used to be a computer whiz - in 1995. I am sad to say that Word has almost passed me by. I can still do a few things in Word and Excel - but I'm mainly just brushing the surface of what those programs can do. So technology has passed me by. At an ever increasing rate of speed, it seems.