by Sora Jhannoa

Created on: February 09, 2008

The Nintendo Wii's main menu has many weird and wonderful options for you to choose from, and by far one of the most enjoyable ones, apart from the games of course, is the Mii Channel.

Mii's are avatars which you can fully customise yourself and use to play games, transfer data to other consoles for specific, Mii friendly games and can share them with other users across the world.

In the Mii channel the player can choose to create a new Mii, edit a Mii, delete a Mii, line them up in various orders to see how many have been made, mail a Mii to another Wii console or even put them onto the Wii Remote so they can be transferred to another console.

Miis are created by selecting the "Create a Mii" button which then takes you to menu screen with a lot of buttons. The tabs along the top let you switch between different elements of your Mii such as the face, body or hair etc, allowing you to edit each individual part. Everything is very customisable and was designed to allow you to create caricatures of yourself and other people with little hassle. Each option can be edited to roughly what you want, e.g. eyes can be moved up and down, the distance between eyebrows can be widened or shortened, and things like height and weight can be edited in. It is a very intuitive system and all the functions are easily identified by their pictures. You can also select which Mii will be your favourite and become the default selected Mii during play in certain Mii compatible games.

The Wii can hold up to 100 Miis, allowing you the freedom to create as many weird and wonderful Miis as you like, and some for visiting friends and family to play with. The Wii Remote can hold up to 10 different Miis at a time.

In Wii Sports you have to choose from one of their custom Miis or from one you have made to play with. The Mii you choose will store all your saved data for that game, which can be used on different consoles if the Mii is transferred to a new machine. This is handy when having Tennis tournaments with friends!

The Mii channel is a really nice addition to the Nintendo Wii and is used mostly to keep scores in party or casual games. Despite its mostly gimmicky nature, the Mii Channel offers you the opportunity to personalise the games by really getting the feeling that you are playing and controlling the game, rather than taking on the persona of a fictional character. It is a really nice system and will hopefully be used a lot more in casual and party genre Wii games in the future!

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