The Day of the Wii

What a day. I'm exhausted. I was up really early after the bus trip yesterday, and zoomed up town to try and get hold of a Nintendo Wii console, which launched today in the UK. This was mildly important since today is our special Wii Open Day and a whole bunch of people are coming to see them. We have one running in our open area.

But we want more.

I had everything carefully planned down to the last minute. Into Game, grab the console and then back to the university in time to set it up. And then I saw the queue in the shop.  At 9:20 I was in the middle of paying for the console. And the first group were due to arrive at 10:00....

Fortunately it all went wonderfully well. Even better than that. Dr. Paul Chapman (who was in the paper and on the local TV yesterday demonstrating the worlds first paraglider trainer that he's just built at Hull) was able to show how is system works, and some of guests even got to have a go at flying. And we showed off the Hive setup. And we did some programming using XNA to take a look underneath the bonnet of a video game. And there was a lot of Wii time.

Then, after lunch, we did it all again. And followed it up with a student run quiz computer games quiz and further Wii play. For just about the whole day you could here howls of laughter and enjoyment as the little console worked it's magic.I took a whole bunch of happy snaps...

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Getting Started

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Letting fly with the controllers

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Damian shows how to box in pink.....

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In the USA people have been crashing into their tellys. I can see why.

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Boxing was very popular for some reason

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Remember to guard...

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...and then punch

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Jon congratulates the Wii winner on the day. And stands in the way of the projector . He  won't do that again...

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Quiz Prizes

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The end of a balanced meal

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"Everybody say Wiiiiiiii!"

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Second prize quiz winners

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And the winners, who showed a deeply scary level of knowledge about computer games.....