More channels, including the exciting Shop Channel
The Forecast Channel, the News Channel, the Internet Channel
We love talking about the weather in the UK so you may be interested to know that you can view the weather for your particularly region or country by selecting the relevant options or even view a complete weekly forecast. Personally, we just look out of the window for that, so we reckon that this is possibly the most useless channel out of those available. This isn’t actually functional yet, it apparently it starts on December 20th. In fact, neither is the News channel (which debuts at the end of January) or the Internet Channel (which debuts on December 23rd with the release of the Opera browser.) It’s disappointing that these channels aren’t available from day one, but we doubt we’re missing out on much.
The Shop Channel
The Wii shopping channel is up and running! There is a tiered payment system to buy Wii points, for example 2000 Wii points costs£14.99, and once you've bought some credit, you can download those old school games on NES or SNES, N64 or Turbografx-16! As you can see from the screenshot below, this is also where you access the Virtual Console which lists games by their platform allowing you to easily find the games you want. Once again the menus are user friendly, the Wii-mote acts as a pointer throughout the menus, so you'll have little problem finding your favourite old skool games.
We did notice that out of all the channels the shop channel was the slowest to load. We’ll let you know more on the service once we’ve tested it out thoroughly.
Other user interface functions include a message board and using the Wii-mote as a pointer to type messages was far quicker than having to move around an alphabet with a control pad! (Xbox 360 text messaging sucks).
