Directional Pad

Nintendo and Opera release the Wii Internet Channel

As promised, Nintendo and Opera put the "trial" version of the Wii Internet Channel up in the Wii shop early thismorning. I had some time to play around with it before heading in to work, and found it pretty impressive. Here's the rundown:

The Good:

• It renders pretty much everything perfectly, thanks to the already great Opera base. Even some pages that use some rather complex CSS work fine, so long as they don't try to detect what OS you're running.
• Basic features all work as you'd expect. Zooming is great, scrolling in all four directions works fine when needed, basic page navigation/back/forward/clicking all works fine, favorites work (and have neat little thumbnails), and RSS feeds even render like they would in Opera, giving you a neatly formatted but stripped-down-to-just-content page.
• Browsing around is pretty snappy, unlike connecting to the Wii Shopping Channel, or getting a System Update from Nintendo.
• Flash support is pretty good, considering the horsepower the Wii has to work with. Streaming videos from Youtube and Google Video both work quite well. Flash game support is also pretty good. Not perfect, but decent.
• It's free. For now, at least.

The Bad:

• It can be clunky at times. As far as weird typing devices go, the Wii virtual-keyboard with predictive text input is the best I've used, but is still not as friendly as a real keyboard.
• It can take a somewhat long time to start the actual program.
• There's no Internet Channel Theme Song, like there are for all the other channels. This displeases me. I want happy soothing music while I'm browsing the interweb.
• Nintendo and Opera haven't clarified how the hell this is going to work when the final version is released. I know I shouldn't care, because the worst-case-scenario is that I have to cough up $5 to keep using it, but they could at least clarify as to if this is the case or not. I hate being left hanging like that.
• Some Flash stuff flat out doesn't work. Line Rider, for instance. You just get a big white box.

The Ugly:

• There's no popup blocking. Think popups were bad before? Just wait until they're fullscreen on your 52" HDTV.
• Nintendo and Opera could have been a lot nicer to developers with the controls. The only way to control it is with the Wiimote, and while all the buttons map to something if you use Javascript or Flash to capture input, they don't map to sane things. The four directions of the Dpad could have been mapped to the arrow keys, but they don't. + and - could have mapped to + and -, but they don't. Luckily, they map to something, so flash games can be retrofitted to support the Wiimote, but still, they could have been so much nicer, and instead they decided to be jerks.
• There's a lot of dead space in the UI, which is just displayed as black bars around all sides of the UI. This might be due to Title Safe/Action Safe areas, and how with a TV you can only assume a certain portion of the screen will be visible, whereas web designers assume everything will be visible, but I'm not really sure. The result kinda sucks, though, as you can see below.

Despite all this, it's still totally worth grabbing. Especially since sites like WiiCade and Albino Blacksheep's Wii Subsection exist. These are repositories of easy-to-access no-intrusion flash games that have been tested with the Wii Browser. Go play Flash Duck Hunt and tell me the browser wasn't worth the download. Just try.

Right, well, that's all for the moment. We'll be getting a batch of reviews up this weekend. In the meantime, here's a bunch of screenshots of the Internet Channel in action:

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