My mission, now that I’m part of the SG Crew, is to bring a little more variety to this site and I plan on doing that by, as you may have already noticed, covering mostly Nintendo topics. The 360 has been getting all the love around here lately and I’m here to spread some of that love out, because all of the systems deserve some spotlight in this utopia of gaming that we live in right now.

I’ve decided to get down to basics and bring to the discussion the core of the Wii: The Menu.

Check it out after the jump!

I’m going to start off nice with the first of this three part series entitled “The Good, The Bad & The Ugly” by looking at “The Good” aspects of the Wii Menu.

First off, I personally think that the Wii has the best layout, for its needs, of all three consoles. The menu is extremely easy to navigate and very attractive to new users, yet not cluttered. Nintendo decided to keep it simple and limit each page to 12 easily distinguishable icons and so far that seems to work really well. Time will tell though if this simple layout remains advantageous as people start adding more and more icons to it.

The Virtual Console - Bringing back a lot of the classic games to an always expanding gaming community was a brilliant idea by Nintendo. They easily have the greatest backlog of classic games of any other company in the world, so it’s nice to see them offering those games to the Wii owners who have never played them and the owners who grew up playing them and want to play them again.

The Internet Channel - Nintendo was the first to implement an easy to use console browser with the standard controller which I find extremely ironic because of Nintendo’s very lackadaisical approach to letting their users get online for actual games.

Is the Wii Browser ideal for day-to-day Internet perusing? Not really, but there have been several occasions where I’ve been able to conveniently pull up the Wii Internet Channel to show my PS3-owning friends the “How You Killed Your Brand” video while we’re all sitting in the living room.

Log Notes - This may not seem like much of an innovation, but I feel that it adds something unique that none of the other consoles have. There have been many times where I’ve had extremely long gaming sessions with the Wii (specifically this past week with Super Mario Galaxy) and after I quit out to the menu I’ll curiously look at the log notes to see exactly how long I was playing. The answer is usually a lot longer than I expected, which depending on how hardcore of gamer you are, this can be a proud or depressing moment.

The Weather Channel - More specifically the globe of the Weather Channel. Seriously, give me a six-pack and that extremely addictive-to-spin globe from the Weather Channel and I could entertain myself for hours.

There you have it, Yousty’s list of all “The Good” things about the Wii Menu. I encourage everyone to come to the forums to discuss the Wii Menu and let me know what I missed. Don’t forget that I’m still going to cover “The Bad” and “The Ugly” so tune in tomorrow for the thrilling second chapter in this straight-to-DVD trilogy.

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