While I've been praising the Wii, it's not without its drawbacks, some of them somewhat odd.

Firstly, GameCube compatibility. This is rather a good feature, giving you use of the entire GameCube back catalogue. The downside - no one stocks GameCube gear anymore¹, and controllers are particularly hard to get hold of (I had to resort to e-Bay). Also, they didn't try and reuse the Wiimote and Nunchuk, which surely would have managed a number of games; nor does the GameCube compatibility use the internal memory: you need a memory card.

Integration is also a little rubbish - GameCube play time doesn't appear in the play time list (unlike Wii games and Virtual Console games). And the controller ports/memory slot are all on the top of the unit - a little inconvenient really.

The Wii UI also suffers from a lack of consistency - some screens have a 'home' button, but the icon changes along with the position. Further, networking is dodgy (Polly's PowerBook gets better reception) and it suffers from Apple syndrome: when it's fine, it's great, but as soon as things go wrong, there's no information to be had. And when the connection fails, the unit has a habit of either never returning to the user (connecting forever, apparently) or not giving the user the option to retry and just resetting the unit.

The Virtual Console also seems to be suffering from laziness - Mario Kart 64 is missing ghost recording, for instance, and many games suffer from a lack of fixing for PAL² (or the option to display in 480i60). Neat idea, but they need to put a bit more work in (and some of the Japanese RPGs?) to make it fly.

Most of these can hopefully be fixed with firmware updates, but it is a little worrying - now consoles are so easily patched will we see a situation like PC games, where early shipping with bugs to be fixed in later patches in the norm? One can only hope for a respite from such, but the cynic in me would not be surprised.

¹ This strikes me as a little odd - surely there's a market here, especially given the limited number of Wii titles in Europe? Game seem to have embraced it a little, re-branding their own third party hardware as 'GameCube for Wii', but even the Oxford St. store is bereft of official hardware and has only [rubbish] trade-in games.

² Interestingly, while Sonic always played slower than Sonic 2 over here I had always thought it was a design decision. It turns out no, it was purely a rubbish conversion from NTSC to PAL.