I dunno. Have they decided how to pronounce it yet? I wonder how the publicty rep in US are going to handle this.
I have a hard time imaging people going up to counter asking, “How much is that Wee selling for?”
There’s still time for them to change it to something like, “W-I-square”.
If you link two of them together for head-to-head gaming, is that going to be Wee-wee networking?
And will the fanboys who slavishly fawn all over it- and engage in internet pissing contests over whether or not it’s better than the other consoles- be referred to as “The Knights Who Say Wii”?
I’ll get my coat…
I had a dream last night, that Nintendo had replaced the “Super” in Super Nintendo Entertainment System with “Power”.
So users would have to talk about their P-NES 
That’s what I was thinking (except for the “every single” part. While there are a significant amount of gaming based webcomics, the genre is nowhere near ubiquitous among comics on the internet).
Also, while I was disgusted at first, the name is kind of growing on me. Think about how “iPod” must have sounded when it came out. It’s not as diminutive as “Wii”, but it still must not have seemed clever. Besides, it’s a unique brand name, Wii can only be associated with the 5th generation Nintendo console.
“iPod” was a sensible reappropriation of the successful “iMac” brand. That said, the wild popularity of the iPod brand, and other neologisms, like “podcast”, which it birthed, probably caught everyone by surprise, including marketing geniuses at Apple.
“Wii” sounds like baby-talk for “piss”. If iPod was little cutesy, “Wii” strikes me as almost hopelessly infantile.
The name lacks handiness. The current consoles are “the cube”, “the box”, “the station” and “the game boy”. Acronyms are fine too, like SNES or PSP. Wii is neither of those. It’s a contrived nickname at best.
I just know that any conversation with that name will end up in a “what?”.
-Hey, what’s that thing in the corner?
-It’s the Nintendo Wii.
-A Nintendo what?
Nintendo made the same point about their name, but spun positively. It can’t be abbreviated. The console’s title will always be mentioned, in print and aloud, by its full name.
“Wii” makes me think of “WWII”, and that didn’t work out well for the Japanese, either.
Cute is enough to veto a game regardless of how fun it might be? Wow.
To some degree, cute can/will affect how fun a game will be - just for example, I love a good RPG, but overly cutesy anime-style graphics drive me INSANE to the point where sometimes I’ll skip a game, regardless of how high it’s rated, if it bugs me enough. Cute also tends to limit what can be done with a game, a little: it’s really hard (though not necessarily impossible) to do an epic storyline with gravitas if you’re way past the cute barrier.
It’s not that cute can veto a game, it’s that cute tends to be itself one more inherent disadvantage to making a game more fun. YMMV.
We can’t. And frankly, the gameplay concept sounds innovative, and if it works like it’s supposed to, it’ll likely be great. But we can make fun of a name before we play it, and that’s what we’re doing here.
And I agree that “wii” is darned near the worst possible name they could have given it. I mean, “Xbox”, well, it’s a box, and “X” has a long, long history in high-tech, glitzy toys. “iPod”, well, a lot of Apple’s products start with “i”, so that’s sort of an identifier of the company, now. And a pod is a small object with rounded edges that would fit comfortably into a pocket. Those names make sense. Or, if they wanted to go with something meaningless, that could work, too. Call it the QZD, or something, even if that doesn’t stand for anything. I mean, how many people could tell you what XP stands for? It hasn’t hurt Microsoft.
I imagine that’s the main reason Nintendo went away from “Revolution”; it’s more of a 14-to-21-year-old-vibe name. But I still can’t imagine “Wii” was the best name of the other choices they could have used.
I’m still interested in the system, though, as I think the Bluetooth controllers might help me introduce more relatives to gaming… 
[holds envelope up to turban] Nintendo Wii.
[rips open envelope, blows into it, pulls out card]
“What does Super Mario leave in the employee toilet?”
Seriously, folks, I love Nintendo. I’ve been playing Nintendo systems all my life. I’ll probably be buying a Wii. It may be a silly name, but I like the sound of it. Nintendo may be number three in video game sales, but I’m sure the Wii proves that with their fans, they’ll always be number one.
Have you seen the logo? The name really works once you see it in print and have that logo etched into your brain, and conjured every time you hear it.
SNES, N64, Gamecube, Wii…
I’ll still be calling it the same thing,
My Nintendo.
“Box” has long been used to refer specifically to computers as well, particularly the core of a given system. You’ll hear people refer to their “Linux box” or “Windows box”, for example. Thus, it makes a certain measure of sense to refer to the core of a game/multimedia computer as a “box”, with the “X” indicating that it does multiple things. The plural of this sense of “box” is, by hackish custom, “boxen”.
I don’t like the XBox, but I can’t fault its name. Except that they might as well have called it the HaloBox, by my logic above. 
I agree, the logo is good. Very simple, but effective. If you haven’t seen it yet, there’s a little animation on Nintendo’s website. The two "i"s look like people, that’s the part I find interesting. Also, the name is fun to say.
OK. Two i’s. Two little peeps, playing video games together. Kinda TWii.