Christmas has, for many years now, been a simple matter of heading over to Margaret's (either in Edinburgh or in France), eating good food, talking about probably far too many things, drinking wine, and at some point going through the book box. (We abandoned individually-wrapped presents years ago; instead, everyone buys a bunch of books, and puts them in a communal box, and then we dig through them, and whoever most wants a book gets it.)
Obviously this isn't going to happen this year, so Cleodhna very sensibly suggested that we do something completely different this year. So we decided to buy a Wii, and play fun multi-player video games all day at Christmas.
The original plan was to wait until shortly before Christmas, but given that the things are scarce, it's probably a good thing that we spotted them on sale for cheap in France (effectively £100 less than what you'd pay in the UK). The high street doesn't have Wiimotes and/or nunchuks for sale, but ebay does, so that's OK. We forgot the Wii sports disc in France, so Cleodhna went out and bought Zelda, The Sims and, crucially for this post, Rayman.
The game itself is wonderfully silly, and ridiculously fun - one of the early mini-games involves running as fast as you can by waving alternately the wiimote and the nunchuk up and down as fast as you can, which is a tremendously intuitive alternative to the old-style arcade decathlon method of button mashing. But what really appeals to me, in a long term, is the musical games.
They're pretty simple in theory - you have visual cues to your left and right, and you need to wave the wiimote (right) or nunchuk (left) in time to score points.
