New Opera browser arrives in yer white box!

Ever spent an entire evening sitting around in your living room with friends, watching YouTube videos on your Wii browser? Perhaps spinning the Weather globe therapeutically is more your thing, or thinking of questions to suggest on the Everybody Votes channel. Us? We watched ferrets. For hours.

Yet now it seems your viewing pleasure is to be improved, and the best part is that it's all for free! At least, until June 30th 2007.

Once you're used to the service and can't remember what life was really like before you had it, Ninty will be asking you to shell out 500 Wii points - enough to purchase a NES game on the Virtual Console (£3.75p). Once you have paid however, it's yours for the life of the machine. Considering the DS browser retails for around £25-£29, it doesn't seem so bad.

Manual as well as automatic zoom control is included, as well as scrolling (using the B button or the D pad). There's parental control over access to the Internet, and apparently all the Wii remotes currently in use will have their cursors showing on screen. It would seem though that only player one can actually select anything, which we will be testing thoroughly.

Yahoo and Google get the thumbs up from Mario, being set as standardised search engines. All in all, it's a smoother, easier to use system. If you were using the trial version and liking it, then this is going to improve your experiences.

At the end of the day, you may think twice before paying to browse if you have an online PC in the same room as your Wii.