Pokémon Pearl First Impressions

Pokémon Pearl begins as many other Pokémon games have in the past. The Professor gives a short speech, giving you a glimpse into the world of Pokémon that you will soon be entering. You are given the opportunity to name your character and your character’s close friend. After finishing this and the Professor’s brief speech, the game begins.

You begin the game in your room watching a television show. The layout of the room itself is very similar to past games in the series, as it includes a television, a bed, a PC, and a famous Nintendo videogame console, this time being the Nintendo Wii. From here, you venture downstairs and after bidding farewell to your mother, you head over to your friend’s place to begin an adventure.

Together you head off towards a nearby lake and bump into the Professor and his assistant, whose gender will be the opposite of yours. There’s no time to get acquainted with either of the two as they are quickly on their way, so quickly in fact that the Professor leaves behind his briefcase in the tall grass. Of course, being the good Samaritans that you are, you and your friend venture into the tall grass to retrieve it. Immediately upon reaching the briefcase, the two of you are attacked, and forced to each choose from three Pokéballs from inside the professor’s briefcase to defend yourselves, choose wisely.

The battle itself shows off many of the new touch screen centric battle interface. Familiar actions such as ordering your Pokemon to attack to using a Pokéball from your bag are mapped to the touch screen and easily accessible. The interface is familiar, but intuitive, and easy to get into. The battle animations are immediately much more dynamic and exciting to look at than those of previous games, adding much visual flair to the battles.

Upon returning the briefcase to the Professor, he commends your battling skills and allows you to keep the Pokémon you chose. In addition, he gives you your Pokédex, only asking that you record data on as many Pokémon as you can during the course of your journey.

After you return home, your mother has a pair of running shoes for you which allow you to traverse the world more quickly. In addition, she has a parcel that she would like you to deliver to your friend who has, unsurprisingly, rushed off on his own and forgotten. When you reach him in a nearby town, it turns out that he has received two town maps and gives you the extra. Your new town map is very helpful for getting to know the vast region of Sinnoh you will soon be exploring.

After your friend departs in his usual abrupt manner, you run into the Professor’s assistant again, who decides to be your mentor. They help you find your way around town, showing you key locations and how to catch a Pokémon. This tutorial is mandatory, so it may come off as a bit of a bore to series vets. After the tutorial is completed, you’ll be gifted with five Pokéballs.

Within the first hour of play, it’s clear that this is a very worthy addition to the Pokemon series. The DS specific elements are already very intriguing and there’s certainly much more to discover upon delving deeper into the game. While nothing so far is drastically different from previous games in the series, the easily accessible gameplay has been proven to be a winner so not much needs to be changed or enhanced. At the end of the first hour of play I was left with the feeling that this would be a deeper and more engaging experience than ever before and I’ll have much more to say about that in my official review.

Wii Internet Browser Impressions

After promises of browsing the Web from the comforts of your living room for months now, Nintendo has finally delivered on that promise. The trial version of the Opera browser has been released for the Wii today for users across the world to download and evaluate until the final version is released next March.

The browser itself is pretty easy to use, you point the Wii remote directly at the screen and use the pointer as a virtual mouse. When you load the browser, you are taken to the start page, where you can then enter a website URL. Text entry is a bit time consuming, and there is no support for a USB keyboard at this time. The navigation buttons are large and easily accessed at the bottom of the screen. There is an option to bookmark your favorite sites so you can return to them later, eliminating the need to type them into the browser over and over again.

The interface is clean and accessible by even the gaming illiterate and it couldn’t get much simpler. Unfortunately, in many ways, it’s too simple. Power users won’t get much use out of it in the long run. You can only view one web page at a time, a far cry from browsers of today which allow you to simultaneously view many web pages at once. Even the Wii’s competitor the Playstation 3 allows for the viewing of multiple websites at once and provides methods of switching between them quickly and efficiently.

The Wii browser has no problems handling graphics heavy sites and loads them pretty quickly. The Wii browser even supports the Macromedia Flash player and has no problems viewing and interacting with the majority of flash content such as games and videos. Not all flash content will work with the Wii browser. Many sites that utilize Flash content coded in more recent Macromedia flash players will not work and will prompt you to upgrade your software, which at this point is impossible.

There are a few bugs in the browser which cause you to arbitrarily jump back to the start page. This is not entirely the fault of the Wii’s browser, much of the time this is due to poor coding. Some sites are unable to be loaded in the Wii browser and constantly refresh themselves before the page has completed loading and then send you back to the start page. Occasionally I have hit the back button to return to a page I was just looking at and found myself back at the starting page. At the end of the day, the glitches, while annoying, won’t significantly impact your enjoyment of the browser.

In the end, the browser does what it promised, allow quick and easy access to the internet from the comforts of your couch. It isn’t exactly the deepest or full featured browser you can get, and won’t replace your PC as your main internet browsing device but for those who just need a way to check their email, news or the latest sports scores, its great. I look forward to the final release next March in which the glitches will (hopefully) be fixed. Until then, if you've got a Wii and you'd like to surf the net on your television screen this is perhaps the easiest way to do it.