Don't look half bad on the Wii!

The Wii web browser seems nicely serviceable. After the initial WiFi bootup, it's surprisingly fast - faster than my Sidekick's browser, anyway. Looks to me like anything wider than 700 pixels will enable horizontal scrolling, which I find annoying. That aside, I did not run into too many sites that looked like they needed a Wii-specific re-design. It renders sites fast and clean. The zoom feature is slick for smaller sets (wish it had multiple levels of zoom, though) and there's even a bare-bones rendering button that instantly reduces any page into mostly text for easy reading.

I have no idea what it's remembering from usage to usage, in terms of recent sites, cookies and caching, etc. But it does seem to keep user/pass for BB sites, which is nice. Not that you'd be doing a whole lot of typing with it. Seems to me that the key stuff is that Flash games work, YouTube videos work, and in general pages display as expected.

It will not show PDFs or play MP3s (unless you happen to find such things embedded inside some kind of Flash player). Loading your Favorites page is terribly slow for some reason. Maybe the final release will address that.

Like I said before, this bloody little thing could become that fabled Internet Appliance that nobody could give away ten years ago. The Wii could adequately replace most peoples's Windows PCs: web browser, photo sharing, email, games. And with no popups, Microsoft security holes, or spam mail... it'd be a step up for most. All it needs is IM support.

As ridiculous as it sounds, there's something a little cooler about seeing your website on a big ol' television, rather than the usual windowed computer screen.

While we're talking about web stuff, I discovered Board Game Geek.com's new widget that displays a few random games from my personal collection. So it's living lower left now. Since I tend to like most of my games, it's sort of like a nice plug for good gaming. It probably needs to include a rating system, so the random list would show what I think of them. DOOMTOWN 10! KILLER BUNNIES 2!

Since I was HTMLing, I dropped the ad for my Animal Crossing Wild World Open Gate Night. ACWW is pretty much dead. Even in the message board world, where Animal Crossing GameCube lived for literal years, Wild World has slowed down considerably. Learn your lesson, Nintendo: include meaningful holidays and genuine multiplayer minigames next time.

I'm sure I'll open the gate every now and then, but I won't bother with a regular schedule. Adamsvil is open by appointment!