'Only one hour wait from here. Thank you for your interest in Nintendo.' Getting inside of the Nintendo E3 booth is definitely not an easy walk-in. Other Nintendo reporters and fans made my way to the Wii demo pods a hard task. Of course, I expected this to happen, so I made sure I arrived at the Los Angeles convention centre on time. But even when I made sure I was there when the doors opened, waiting in the line to go into the Nintendo booth was unavoidable.

Nintendo sure has one hell of a booth this year with I guess more than fifty Wii demo pods. The list of playable games is quite large. Of course there's the Zelda: Twilight Princess that gets plenty of attention from visitors. Super Mario Galaxy is another one well visited. Although I haven't played this game myself yet, I can say that this new Mario title � in the graphical style of Mario Sunshine - looks promising. Mario can be moved by pointing around the screen. A little yellow star follows your movement to indicate where you're aiming the remote to. Expect more about this title later this week.

The Wii console itself surprised me by looking smaller than I expected it to be. It sure looks smooth and sexy, just like the 'Wiimote'. The remote is even smaller than the most casual remote you probably have lying by your TV. Its grip is perfect with buttons positioned on the most comfortable places. The added speaker doesn't ruin the Ipod-ish look and succeeds well in creating extra sound effects. The bar that you have to place above or under your television isn't big either and won't make your TV set look cheap.

There're a bunch of titles I've played you'll read more about on Revolution Europe soon. The Wii sports titles for instance, which didn't require much input from players, especially the Tennis one. The Duck Hunt game is in fact a demo that shows the pointer possibilities of the remote. It doesn't look like it's going to be released in this form separately, but more as a bundle with other little games.

WarioWare: Smooth Moves is the title everyone expected to be released on the Wii. The minigames look as crazy as ever � especially one where players have to rotate a hoop around themselves - and show enough variety to keep people enjoying it for a long time. Another popular title which I got my hands on was Red Steel, from Ubisoft. After all of those good stories about it, I got a bit disappointed after my experience with it. The AI level seems rather low and characters looked a bit out of place there. The controlling however feels quite natural.

And then there's the one game that did strike me because of the good looking graphics. It's from the good old friends of Nintendo: Sega. Their new Sonic title played innovative and fluently, had that recognisable fast-paced Sonic action in it and was looking astonishingly good. However, this title won't appear before the end of 2006. More on it in our hands-on report.

By the time I was exiting the Nintendo booth there was still people waiting to get in. It's great to see that people are so interested in Nintendo's new way of playing games. The playable titles sure show the potential of the Nintendo Wii: let's wait and see how full titles are going to hold up. Oh, and if you would like to know, the line to Sony's booth was in fact way shorter.

Nik Wouters
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