So this Thanksgiving my wife and I went over to her parent’s place and brought along the Wii since she had talked it up so much over the past four days. Now, her parents are not gamers in the least. Her father played EA’s NHL titles on the PC in the mid 90s, and besides the occasional game of Tetris on the original Game Boy, I don’t think her mother had played a game since. Nintendo stated that this system was made to get gamers and non-gamers playing together and I wanted to see just how easy this would be to accomplish.

Both of my wife’s parents were big into bowling when she was a child, so out of all the Wii Sports games we figured this would be the one to get them playing. After hooking it up, we were able to convince her father to give it a try first. Here is some video I shot of what I think is his second or third time using the system. As you’ll see, he’s still asking what all of the buttons do, but he’s able to bowl a nice frame for just starting out.

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Continue reading for further results from the Wii Experiment.

Eventually we were able to get my mother-in-law to play after she saw how much fun her husband was having with this “fake bowling.” Amazingly she picked the whole process up rather quickly and, as you can see below, was able to bowl a strike on her second frame.

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We ended up bowling on the Wii for six hours straight. Every time the game finished we would get to the screen which gave us the option to “Play Again” or “Quit” and my father-in-law would yell, “AGAIN!!!” This might have been partially due to the amount of adult beverages we consumed throughout the evening but hey, we needed to give this bowling experience a bit of authenticity right?

The more we played the more advanced tactics were used. My father-in-law eventually figured out how to put spin on the ball, and after a few frames of experimentation was able to hook it into the pocket and pull off more strikes. My wife continued her domination over everyone and reached a personal best of 214. She even broke Pro level and has 1075 skill points. Needless to say, two days after the event all of our arms are hurting. Who knew that a video game that isn’t very demanding physically could wear your muscles out so much?

I think this just goes to prove that Nintendo’s Wii is truly a system that anyone can enjoy. The controls are so intuitive that you don’t even need a gaming background to play them. The fact that experiences picked up in real life, such as bowling for ten years on a league, can be applied almost seamlessly towards playing the game is a credit to Nintendo’s innovation. Plus it can get your father-in-law to do this:

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