Accessories abound for Wii, Mii, and thee

holiday gifts
You can make your favorite Nintendo Wii addict happy this holiday season for the cost of a Charlie Brown Christmas tree.

The Wii console remains expensive and (in many quarters) hard to find on store shelves. But accessories and titles for the Wii are cheap and easy to find.

Nintendo in November will begin rolling out new services and titles for the family-friendly gaming system. Nintendo has a new accessory that will help players enlarge their circle of friends in the Mii community.

The new Wii Speak Channel will bring more of the collaborative and networking experiences that Nintendo has been promising since it released the gaming console.

With Wii Speak, up to four people can chat over the Internet, after swapping their unique "friend codes." Friends can also leave voice messages for one other. They can also create audio captions for a slide show.

While you are chatting online, your Mii (that's your Wii avatar) will appear to be chatting, too. Your purchase of the new Wii Speak microphone (about $30) will come with a code, so you can download the Wii Speak Channel software from the Wii Shop Channel. (The software, once you enter the code, will be free.) Wii Speak goes live Nov. 16.

Nintendo's titles for its downloadable games service, WiiWare, will also ring a few bells from Christmases past: Tetris Party, for example, is a collection of single- and multi-player games based on the classic some have been playing now for decades.

And for those who insist on learning being part of the fun, Nintendo describes another new Wii title, World of Goo, as a "physics-based puzzle/construction game," in which you shape bridges and other structures from globs of the stuff.

We can also look forward to new Wii versions of Punch-Out and Sin & Punishment (due for release in 2009), and a slew of titles for the Nintendo DS around the holidays.

Hospitality

Marriott puts out a welcome mat for the Wii addicts

If your next out-of-town visitors happen to be Wii addicts, you might want to steer them toward the Boston Marriott Cambridge Hotel at Kendall Square. That's where hotel guests have been loading up on Wii games and salty snacks since summer. (Hey, with the Hotel at MIT nearby, you've got to find new ways to bring in the nerds.)

The Marriott through Oct. 31 is offering rooms equipped with Wii consoles. A basket of free carbs awaits each Wii room guest at check-in.

If you take your Wii games sitting down (the horror!) or are the health-conscious sort, a Marriott spokeswoman tells me you might be able to swap in a free fruit basket instead.

You can surf the TVs in the Wii rooms for Mario Kart, Wii Sports, and 18 other titles (the list is growing), which download automatically to the console - no game discs are needed.

The Marriott is test-marketing the Wii rooms through its "Wii Stay and Play" and "Wii and You" promotions.

Hotel managers say they would like to make the rooms, which go for $219 to $369 a night, a permanent feature.

web games

GPS readings from your opponent's cellphones let you play the terminator

Think Assassin for the GPS generation:

Terminator Ambush (www.terminatorambush.com) is a Web game, and an iPhone game, whose players try to anticipate their opponents' next destination, as reported by their GPS phones.

After registering as either a terminator or a human, you lay traps for your enemies on a map depicting an imagined urban landscape.

The so-hip-it-hurts interactive agency 65 Media developed the game to promote the new season of the Fox action series "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles."

The GPS coordinates you see in Ambush are fictional analogues to real-world places. Distances between real locations are accurately reflected in the imagined world.

The anonymizing of true GPS coordinates is designed to protect players' privacy, said 65 Media founder and chief creative officer Albin Reif.

"We don't want people to be really terminating each other," he said.