No Wii for me

I was telling Kruddler and my brother last night that I was seriously considering getting the new Nintendo Wii console. Yeah I know it's not much more powerful than the original Xbox, nor does it feature high definition graphics or have a DVD/HD/BlueRay player but at $249 it costs a whole lot less then the other systems from Microsoft and Sony and more importantly it has games that Arianna can play. They other day she wanted me to hook up the Xbox so she could play Halo (she likes the feel of the force feedback controller when she fires) but ended up frustrated since she couldn't use the controller very well. I saw some videos on normal people (not hard core gamers) just pick up a Wii Remote and immediately use it in games like Wii Sports.

After a good game of Warcraft III last night I signed off of iChat and drove to my local Target which I already knew had 60 units. There was a line of about 20 people ahead of me around 10:00pm so I setup my folding chair and waited with the rest of the group. It was actually an interesting mix of people, half were women who were holding seats for their husbands/boyfriends, some actually wanted the console for themselves (I never really met a girl gamer until last night, she was talking about the infamous SouthPark episode of WoW). The guy I was sitting next to was a big PlayStation fan but was going to buy the console for a friend.

After waiting in the cold until midnight the line wasn't getting any longer (I counted about 35 people total then) and I was thinking, do I really want to wait another 8 hours for this so I said my good byes and left. I figured that I'll just get some sleep and wake up at 5:00am to wait in line again. I slept in and woke up at 6:30am. I quickly took a shower and rushed back to Target only to find 40 more people in line. Doh! I ended up waiting 30 minutes when a Target employee started passing tickets with numbers. No ticket, no Wii. She gave the last ticket to someone about 14 people ahead of me. Oh well I'm not really in a rush to get it (most of the guys waiting in line were going to race home to play it) and hopefully I can snag one before Christmas. Worse case scenario is that I get it for Arianna (and myself :)) for her birthday in February.

What was really funny was that after everybody in the front got their tickets the rest of started to walk away when some guy that scored a ticket shouted "Does anybody want to buy my ticket? Who wants a Wii!!!". I laughed at the profiteer and walked away while other people were asking him "So how much do you want for it?", he replied, "How much do you want to pay?".

A good article describing the pros and cons of the Wii can be found here.