I really like Ars Technica and trust their journalism and opinions on many matters.  I really enjoyed their brutally honest review of the the Sony PS3.  But I read their review of the Nintendo Wii last night and was left disappointed.

I love the Wii.  I'm having a blast honing my golf swing and bowling arm.  But let's face it, it's not perfect.  And whilst the PS3 was heavily criticised on every element, I felt Ars Technica took it easy on the Wii.  They made obvious comment about lack of graphical power and I was pleased to read that they shared the same opinion I had of the nunchuck.  But they didn't address a few of the niggly issues that I expected them to.

The first is the lack of background downloads.  This was a strong negative for the PS3 but no mention was made of it for the Wii.  And whilst the Wii's game downloads are much smaller than PS3 downloads, I still had to watch Mario collect coins for 30 minutes whilst downloading Mario 64.  For reference, that's how the Wii shows the progress of a downloading game – an 8-bit Mario runs from left to right endlessly, collecting coins that ring out with the familiar 8-bit ding that becomes annoying after not too long.  Mario breaks one of three bricks when each third of a download is complete (I assume).  Sound cryptic?  It is.  There is really no way to know exactly how much of a download is complete.  They should have just used the progress bar they use for system updates.  It would be less annoying.

I also think they should have pointed out that whilst the Classic Controller costs only US$20 (AU$30), this is in addition to the price of a Wii Remote.  If you want to play a four player Nintendo 64 game you will need four Classic Controllers and four Wii Remotes.  This is a AU$330 investment.  I consider this a pretty important point, especially when everyone keeps harping on about how affordable the Wii is.  I would also like to hear a statement about if the Classic Controller can be used for Gamecube games.  And if not, that deserves a strong strike against Nintendo and it's Wii.

Another point that was overlooked was that whilst the Wii supports MP3 play back in Excite Truck, and during photo slide shows, it doesn't support it outside of these features.  I recognise that the Wii isn't aimed at being a complete entertainment solution like the PS3, but would have it been so hard to include an MP3 player?  Creating a party mix of MP3's on an SD card to play in the Wii seems like something I think many people would appreciate.  Maybe an MP3 Player channel will come.

Whilst I feel Ars Technica's review of the Wii was a soft, I don't disagree with the final score of 8 out of 10.  I feel Ars could have been a little more thorough and addressed some elements of the Wii that have been overlooked by every other review I've seen.