Well, after our problems yesterday and sitting down with a friend who is expert on Macintosh computers - we made the upgrade to Macintosh OS X Leopard.

I was so relieved just to see our laptop booting up properly again - but I’m also impressed by the new look of the system and one of the features I want to explore right away is the ability to back up the Mac on a hard-drive.

It took awhile for the system to go through all its processes and adapt to the laptop hardware, which gave me ample time to observe my friend and his daughter play Guitar Hero 3 on their Wii system. I had never tried out the Wii system before and wanted to try out tennis. I ended up trying out boxing as well. I think I spent most of my time just figuring out a little bit about how the controllers work.

It’s really a very unique approach to gaming and I loved the whole experience. At first I was a little frustrated because my tennis guy on the screen was lobbing the tennis ball directly to the computer player on the other side - turning the game into a perpetual volley that eventually I would lose. Then I learned that if I made a downward motion while ’swinging’ the control that it would put a little more spritz into the return.

I don’t know if we’ll be purchasing a Wii system anytime soon but it’s definitely my preference if we were going to purchase a gaming system. I’m intrigued by the possibilities of the Wii. It seems to me that if the system were set up right, it could be a real training tool as well as a fun game to play - whether to play guitar or to swing a racket. Right now it’s like playing a cartoon - that isn’t a criticism, just an observation.  It’s still a lot of fun …

… but I wonder if somewhere in a computer lab there’s a guy testing out an experimental Wii-type system that employs a real guitar, a real tennis racket or boxing gloves. Of course, that could end up being a bit dangerous to the furniture or others in a living room environment … but still, that’s what the Wii system experience had me thinking about.

One thing I read about recently is that the Wii system is now adopting more of the violent hack-n-slash type games and the interesting/intriguing/disturbing factor with this is that instead of a player hitting a joystick button they are making the stabbing/slashing motions with their arms.  I suppose that a player feels (psychologically) more like he/she is actually doing the killing in those kinds of games.  I wonder how long it will take before researchers are able to show whether that is a positive or a negative thing (although I am sure it will be very popular anyway).

I wonder as well about the potential of force feedback to the controller.  I think these days we’re playing a sort of Pac-Man/Space Invaders version of the games that will be in the future.  What would it be like to swing a controller and actually feel some kind of physical response or tremor as you strike the ball?