Nine ways your Wii should work with your mobile phone
It’s all about convergence, innit. Gadgets working with other gadgets in perfect harmony.
Think connecting your digital camera to your TV to show off photos, or setting up your PC to control your hi-fi. It’s The Future. And mobile phones are likely to be at the centre of it.
So wouldn’t it be cool if your Wii could be hooked up to your mobile to do wonderful things? Like, ooh, the nine suggestions below.
1. Miis as wallpapers. Obvious, really. Why spend three quid on a picture of Crazy Frog when you can have your very own Mii staring out at you from your phone? They could even be animated, jiggling about when you receive a phone call.
2. Wii Shop application. You’re sitting on the bus or train, so call up your Wii Shop app on the phone, and browse through this week’s Virtual Console games, before choosing which one to buy. It’ll be downloaded by the time you get home. Even more amazing would be the ability to top up your Wii Points via the phone, with the cost being added to your mobile bill.
3. Proper cross-platform games. Take Zelda as an example. What if you could have a Zelda mini-game sitting on your phone. A simple one-thumb game, that helps you practice one particular skill – shooting arrows, maybe, or swordfighting. Whenever you’re away from the house, you could play the mobile game, and when you get home, sync it wirelessly with your Wii, to upgrade Link in the Wii version. It’s technically possible already, y’know.
4. Ringtones of the Wii menu music. You know you want them.
5. Wii-to-mobile messaging. You can send messages to your Wii friends from the console, but it’d be nice to have this work with mobile phones too. If you get a message while out and about, the sender’s Mii could pop up on your phone as an MMS with the text.
6. A Wiimote branded mobile. Who’d want an iPhone if someone created this? Note, it would also be way better than a Nokia-branded Wii-mote.
7. Mobile Wii application. This’d be promotional: an application that sits on your phone, connecting to the network whenever you fire it up. And it’d download news, reviews, video footage of new Wii games, and anything else relevant. Nintendo could partner with a mobile technology firm to create it – there’s no shortage of companies capable of creating these ‘on-device portals’ (as they’re called).
8. Cameraphone support in Wii games. Take your phone out, and snap a photo of a friend, relation or complete stranger. Now come back, send it wirelessly to your Wii, and see it converted into a Mii. Cool. Or better still, games could send you out to take snaps. In Japan, Square Enix has a Final Fantasy mobile game that gets players to take camphone snaps to turn into spell ingredients. This could be adapted to work with Wii games – for example to create a fire spell, you’d have to go out and take pictures of orange things using your phone.
9. Use your Wiimote as a Bluetooth headset. I’m not sure why I think this would be cool, or indeed useful. But I just do.
10. Well, I couldn’t think of a tenth. What are your ideas…
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March 6th, 2007 at 3:01 pm
[...] Could those dastardly mobile game developers be stealing ideas from our beloved Wii? It certainly looks like it, with gaming developer Paul Coulton citing the console as a major influence in developing revolutionary new games for mobile phones. He commented during the ‘Using Touch, Sight and Gesture in Mobile Games’ keynotes speech at the Gaming Developers Conference today that the “Wii has had an amazing impact but this technology in mobile phones could ultimately be even more dramatic, the possibilities are endless with this technology. It’s about thinking of new ways to play games, that might be played by very different people than we are used to”. Forget about developing new gaming technology for mobiles, Coulton - start working through our list of ‘Nine Ways The Wii Could Work With A Mobile Phone’ already, darnit! (Via CVG). [...]