Got all three… I’ll start with Wii.

Having recently acquired a Nintendo Wii, I am both proud and ashamed to report that I have all three current-gen consoles, all in black. I’ve decided to give my opinion on each one.

I’ll start with the Wii. The Good Things include the fact that the girlfriend can and will play it, and the classic games available on the Virtual Console. Super Metroid is once again taking up a lot of gaming time. I love it so very much. The other games I’ve played thus far are also quite good and a lot of fun.

Now for Bad Things. We know the graphics aren’t up to the standard of the other two games machines, but this is most definitely not helped by the, frankly, shit cable situation. With the console you get composite cables. Memories of composite cables are fading, so I’ll remind readers that they are the yellow, red and white trio of cables. They suck. Composite is only one step ahead of ye olde RF and  gives a fuzzy picture with dull, washed-out colours. So you go and pay Nintendo more money for component cables to get a decent picture. But once you have that, the VC games look crap because Nintendo can’t be bothered to alter them, so at the moment I’m swapping the cables around accoring to the games I’m playing. That would be almost acceptable if the VC games were free, or even cheaper. But you can buy a NES, a SNES and an N64 and their games for peanuts on eBay, so the VC games aren’t such great value, plus you can’t get all the games you would if you bought the original consoles. No Contra 1, 2 or 4, no Mario Kart, no Goldeneye, I could go on . Downloading them for the Wii is more convenient but not that cheap and not yet comprehensive. Why does it take so long to add content if they’re not even taking measures to make them compatible with modern cables?

You only get one controller. The other consoles have this issue as well, but with the Wii it’s particularly annoying because it’s Nintendo pedal it as a family ‘n’ friends machine. Multiplayer is the big seller here; in order to play the Wii as it was intended and marketed, you need another magic wand. An additional Motion Plus controller will set you back fifty pounds. FIFTY POUNDS!

This means (all at time of writing, of course) that to play the £165 console with one friend and half-decent picture quality, you need to spend a total of £235. You can get an XBox 360 Elite with two games and a year’s Gold Live membership for the same sort of money. Another fifteen notes will buy you a 120Gb PS3 slim. And they both come with HDMI cables.

The Wii is a cool machine and I’m glad I have one, but in the current market, they are not cheap and they are not good value for money. I’m knocking Nintendo here, not the Wii. It’s good at what it does and I would recommend it to people, but only if they’re still listening after I tell them that buying the necessary kit and a couple of games will set them back £300.