FinaWii!

Sorry, I couldn't resist the terrible title to this post. I was originally going to title it "Extreme Measures for Lucky Seventeen," but made a last minute change.

Now, I know that in my last post, I promised to not blog about the Wii for a while. Well, it's been a while. It just so happens that it has been such a busy while that there hasn't been any intermediate posts! My bad.

(I am going to put up a significant post regarding Richard Dawkin's excellent "The God Delusion" very soon. I have 50 pages left to read.)

In a previous post, I mentioned how I was going to be out of town on December 8th and miss the big third Best Buy Wii release day. But then my plans changed--somewhat. I was still out of town. But I didn't miss the third Best Buy shipment release.

I gots one!

My wife and I drove 8 hours Thursday night so I could be in line by 5AM or so at the Best Buy in a certain big city. As it turns out, we were early, arriving shortly after 3:30AM. And that was a damn good thing, as I was already 28th in line at this time. Luckily, 11 people in front of me were in line for PS3s, so I picked up lucky Wii 17. By 4AM, the 24 Wiis were spoken for, but that didn't stop another 50 plus people from lining up for disappointment, until Best Buy handed out tickets at 8AM.

Standing / sitting in line for over 6 hours in total (including an hour after the tickets were handed out) was quite the experience. It wasn't a terrible morning, weather-wise, but it sure started to feel cold after a few minutes. And I didn't come prepared at all, as I underestimated how long I was going to have to be in line and how cold it would be before the sun came up. The people in line were pretty good--Nintendo fanboys all around. (In fact, the line was dominated by people seeking the 24 Wiis, rather than the 14 PS3s that were available--the Wiis actually sold out first.)

I certainly would never want to do anything like that ever again. But it was so very much worth it this time! Because of this change of plans, I had my new Wii with me as we visited our out of town family, and we had some great times playing Wii Sports and creating Miis.

I set up my Wii at home this morning before work and finally played some Zelda. Ah, bliss! I have another 50-some hours of Zelda fun ahead of me in the next few months.

I also already spent 1900 Wii points on some classic NES and Sega games for the Virtual Console. I can't wait until some of my favourites are available (Super Mario Kart!). The Wiimote works surprisingly well as an NES controller when turned on its side.

So, anyway, enough about the Wii... back to reading "The God Delusion."