FUN FACTOR:

In the Wii-PS3 Playoff, Nintendo Upsets Sony on the Fun Factor (Mike Musgrove, November 23, 2006, Washington Post)

There was a showdown between the Nintendo Wii and the Sony PlayStation 3 at The Post's game testing lab last weekend.

Here's how it went down: I invited a bunch of my friends, five guys and three gals, over to check out the new systems. Few of them play or care about video games, but they were all curious to see the PlayStation 3, the cutting-edge game console that sparked real-world mayhem on its release Friday.

By comparison, most of my friends arrived having heard little about Nintendo's new system. But, as it turned out, that device was the hit of the party. [...]

While the people in my group preferred looking at the PS3's games, they preferred playing the Wii.

My friends played the Wii's sports games against each other all weekend, using goofy, cartoony avatars called "Miis" that they constructed to represent themselves in the game. Give a couple of newlyweds a pair of Wii controllers, pop in the boxing game and the entertainment value is priceless. We started out playing the game sitting down, but eventually we took to our feet to get a better range of motion with the controllers.

I have never seen a bunch of non-gamers get into this stuff like this, and I have never heard anybody laugh so much while playing any video game. A few of them now say they plan to buy the system for themselves.

My friend Andy has always seemed to dislike video games, but he was immediately taken by the Nintendo system in a way that I -- and he -- did not expect. "I'm surprised by how much I like it," he said. "The controller is so intuitive."