While the Nintendo Wii is still new to me, I'm sure some of its more advanced features are sure to prove me late to the game. Yesterday, while browsing the Wii's Shopping Channel, I found that you can download classic original Nintendo games directly to the Wii's hard drive, without buying a game disc. For the equivalent of $5, I was able to download the original Super Mario Bros. video game, helping me reestablish my dominance over Goombas and gain the opportunity to save The Princess, all for less than the price of a McDonald's Happy Meal.Like any good NES user back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I played my unfair share of Mario Bros, and know all the hidden tricks. But while it's been a long time since I've played the game on an NES console, I had the game fired up and ready to go on our 42-inch plasma TV last night, a brand new experience.
Engadget posted a story yesterday calling for Nintendo to enable DVD playback on the Wii - a laudable effort, to be sure. But for me, I continue to get geeked out by the fact this slim console has the ability to move beyond DVDs, and can grab new games from the cloud for near-immediate playing. It's a lot like video games on demand. For an extremely small cost basis, I was able to pull down one of the world's classics, a game which doesn't get any less fun with time, and one I likely would have paid ten times as much for the first time around. That's almost as fun as finding a hidden "1 Up" mushroom!