Nintendo recently released the Wii Forecast Channel to everyone across the world, and we've been spending the time since then putting the service to the test.

Configuring the Forecast Channel is quick and easy. The setup prompts ask you to select your state and a nearby city from a provided list. Punching those in brings you to the local page for that location. Every location North America has a UV index rating, the current temperature, today's high temperature/weather, tommorrow's high temperature/weather and a 5-day forecast. The default display is the local current temperature/weather screen, which also is shown when selecting the Forecast Channel from the Wii Menu.

Right away there's something fishy with the current weather display. The best we can figure, it only updates once or twice a day. Temperatures change constantly within a 24-hour period, so this makes little sense. As I type this, it is a very, very cold midnight in Southern California, yet my Wii is telling me it is currently a sunny 61 degrees outside. What's even more confusing is that cities within the same geographical region have a completely different story to tell. As of right now Flagstaff, Arizona has a relatively correct weather listing, with a moon indicating night-time clear skies. But directly to the south, Phoenix and Tuscon are showing sunny skies. Huh? Let's hope that gets straightened out in the future.

The neat part of the Forecast Channel is being able to switch to a globe view and use the Wii remote to navigate around to various locations around the world. There are a lot of cities you can snoop in on and check what the weather is like at the moment. Or at least, whatever moment the current weather snapshot was taken. It doesn't look like worldwide locations are completely accurate at the time you access them, either. It's probably a better idea to switch the display to show tomorrow's temps and weather forecasts, since those aren't dependent on what the current time is.

There's some extra fun stuff hidden away inside the Forecast Channel, as is to be expected with the Wii. First of all, the sound of rain can be heard when your local weather is rain, or when highlighting a rainy location on the globe screen. (Hope that it does not rain often, because raining is bad.) Also on the globe screen, you can zoom all the way out to show the entire planet in outer space. This makes it easier to spin the globe around at a high rate of speed, just like you did with the big globe in your high school's library. Combined with the ability to twist the remote to spin the Earth about a different axis, you have full control over the entire world. In other words, you can pivot the planet to check out what the weather's like in the South Pole, or get a close up of the North Pole to see what Santa's up to. It's fun to play around with the globe screen, if for no other reason but to check the weather in locations that you've never heard of before.

The Forecast Channel does a good job of outlining future weather. As far as we can tell, the 5-day forecast is pretty accurate. It should be, since Nintendo is using the the world's largest full-service weather company for the weather data. If you want to find out what the weather in the present is like, your best bet is to get the Internet Channel hits and find out what it is with the real Weather Channel...or you could just go outside and check it for yourself.