My opinion of Nintendo in the past has never really been that good, mainly due their gamebody, nes and snes systems which I wasn't all that impressed by. I also think that a lot of their products are over priced.

After some serious speculation and consideration my partner decided to by a Nintendo Wii for our son for his birthday. I must say that my first impression was that the wiring looks very cheap, tacky and thin. In fact, within two days the rubber seal on two of the wires had worn down to expose the two wires inside.

The games themselves are actually quite good fun at first but once you've played them that's it, you've played them. They are not really very durable and whilst the graphics are very simple and not very detailed the animation is smooth and the games are unique.

The original motivation behind buying a Wii was to get our son more active instead of sitting in front of his PS2 or X-box (yes, he has both)in front of the tv. After playing some bowling and some golf for a night my partner found herself aching like mad the next day, so it definitely must have given her some exercise.

The only other thing that I was disappointed by was the fact that when playing the games, you don't really have to aim for where you want the ball (or whatever) to go. As long as you manage to successfully hit the ball, it will pretty much end up in the correct destination most of the time. This pretty much defeats the point of playing games like golf and I found myself growing very bored of the games very quickly.

The quality of the console is not the best and if you decided to compare it to the x-box using my sons technique it wouldn't survive! However, when my son dropped his 21" tv from a shelf on top of his x-box it survived with absolutely no damage! Do this to a Wii and you're asking for it. The various parts that come with the console I also found to be very flimsy, tacky and made of cheap plastic.