The line at Walmart. Are you here for the poinsettias too?
On Saturday, November 18th, 2006, I found myself inside the lawn and garden section of a local Walmart. I had come prepared. Papers to read, books, movies for the laptop. I was ready for a camp out. So were some fifty other people. The object of our desire, the 12:01am release of the Nintendo Wii. I arrived a little after 2pm, the list was organized and jovial. “You here for the poinsettias too?” a well groomed guy in his early twenties asked me as I finally found where the line was hiding. Next to him was a group of four other twenty somethings furiously battling on their DS Lites. “We got a list. Put your name on, hang out for a while.” I looked at the list, I would be number 37. Great, the person on the phone thought they were getting 50 or so. I would go home with a Wii. Around the line people were whispering that the total would be 63. The sister of a co-worker seemed pretty reliable on that issue. They told us they would tell us the final count at 5pm.
Great, that’s only three hours away. I can wait that long to find out for certain if I can get one. I was not camping out until midnight only to not get a Wii. I sat down next to some other folks, a few years younger me than, and began to talk. Some of the folks around me were casual gamers, like myself. There was a 14 year old kid whose parents periodically came by to check on him. And of course, the forty-ish mother who had no knowledge of the Wii, but happened to see the line forming at noon and decided to camp out.
Killing time in line.
5pm came and went, still no count. We would hear at 6pm. The 14 year old was getting impatient, checking his cell phone for the time every other minute. The other folks bought a game of scrabble and were busy with that. I was reading materials for my class the next day. It was going well. At 6:20pm a Walmart official came in - “We have 31 Wiis for sale. Each person will be allowed one Wii, three games, and one additional controller”. Hearts sunk. Roll call of the list revealed that 30 of the first 31 people were still there. I wasn’t going to get one. I went home, had dinner with my wife, and contemplated my next steps.
I had options. Target and Best Buy were possible camp out sites. But, it was cold outside, I was not camping all night. With having to teach the next morning at 10am, this would not be acceptable. I might have been able to swing Target, arriving around 5am, but I would need to be home by 8:30am to get Kristina to Church. No, that wasn’t going to work, there would no Wii purchased at retail on launch day. What about the Internet? Rumors abounded that Amazon would put the Wii on sale during the morning. Well, maybe I can get up at 3am and get one there. I didn’t set my alarm, but happened to wake up at 2:50am. Hopped on my computer, and hit reload furiously. 3:15am came and I realized it wasn’t going to happen. I looked at other sites. Nothing. I headed back to bed, Wii-less.
Looking at Amazon’s Wii information the next day, I saw a message board had popped up in the discussion section. Great, lets see what people know. Crap, I missed Micro Center having them available that morning. Amazon sold out in less than a minute that morning at 11am EST. Online was looking dim. I found WiiSeeker, which provided a list of stores that sold the Wii and estimated inventories that morning. Gathering a list of phone numbers, I made a spreadsheet and started calling. Nothing. Some people were outright rude, Toys R Us told me they wouldn’t get more before Christmas. Most places didn’t know. The employees at Gamestop seemed to be the most helpful, but always said they didn’t know. I hatched a plan, call every day, checking for inventory. See what I can find.
Monday rolled around. I did some work in the morning, then called the local Gamestops around me. First one said “Maybe on Friday”. The second one was pay-dirt. They had 3 Wii’s that arrived 10 minutes beforehand. I dropped what I was doing and ran the one and a half miles to the store. Bingo. Wii. Zelda. Happiness. No extra controllers, no Super Monkey Ball. But I had something. Working was going to be very hard for the rest of the day. I floated on the message board at Amazon, posted my success, and was able to help out another person in Pittsburgh. She got her Wii twenty minutes after me. The last one. I felt like I did my part to better the world for the day.
I skipped my seminars for the rest of the day, went home, rewired my entertainment center, and had the Wii up and running within 10 minutes. A little finagling was required to get it on the wireless network – mainly because I don’t broadcast my SSID at home, so the Wii couldn’t automatically detect it. No problem, type the name in using the Wiimote, which is surprisingly easy, but not so fast, and enter the encryption key. Bingo. Online. Wait twenty minutes for downloads of system updates, and I was good. Awesome. Time to pop in Wii Sports! It was 3pm on Monday, November 20th.
As a I learned to bowl I kept on saying to myself “Wow, this is pretty easy. Just like they showed in the videos.” My first game was a 111, not bad. Not great either. The sport I really stunk at? Baseball. I lost six to nothing. Boxing was okay, but seemed really disjoint. It was all individual bouts with no pattern, no evolution, and no title bout. Bummer, the reviews might have been right on that one. Tennis and golf were both better than expected and very enjoyable. The games were not difficult to grasp, but getting good at them was going to take some time. After a few hours of bowling, tennis, and golf, it was time for Zelda – the game for the Wii console.
Unhappy Wii Sports Disc
I slid the disc in. Uh oh. The Wii menu said that it could not read the disc. Crap. Pop Wii Sports back in. No dice. My console wasn’t reading anything. Back to Zelda, the menu comes up to play Zelda. Great, I tell it start. It’s slow. It reminds me of playing an original Playstation game. Horrible load time. I start the game, the intro cinematic is slow and jerky. Now it starts jumping around. What the hell is going on? This won’t do. I turn off the Wii and turn the Wii to lie flat instead of being on it’s side. It seems like everything is working better. Zelda plays just fine now. Yay. Let’s go explore Ordon!
On Tuesday, now that I had a Wii, I set my sights on the next goal. Getting a Wii Remote for two player action. This was going to be hard. Nothing on Tuesday. I called a dozen places, and drove to Best Buy and Target, only to return empty handed. We still were going to be single player for a while. Wednesday started out grim. I called up the same Gamestop I had bought the Wii from, no luck. Another Gamestop, about a mile from work, had a few Wii Remotes in stock. Dropping what I was doing, I ran to the bus. I arrived only too late. The guy right in front of me bought all three remotes. Crap. I’m stuck in one player land. I got back on the bus to sulk…and in the process missed my stop and ended up by the other Gamestop – the one that has told me 45 minutes earlier they didn’t have any. I stopped in, and what’s this? A Wii Remote just taken out of the shipping box. Awesome. No nunchuks, but at least I have another remote. I also got Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz and a classic controller. Much rolling of monkeys was about to ensue.
And rolling they did. Super Monkey Ball reminds me quite a bit of Neverball, which can be played in a similar manner when using a tilt sensitive controller. Only Super Monkey Ball has much better graphics, sound, levels, etc. The 50 minigames included were quite a bit of fun too, but some, honestly, were pretty bad. Maybe they’d be better with four people or something. I dunno. Mainly it seemed like the games where you had to aim the remote at screen were the hardest, largely because they lacked the visual cue to where you were aiming and required such frantic motion that it made things difficult. That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy Super Monkey Ball, I just enjoy Wii Sports and Zelda a whole lot more.
Thursday was Thanksgiving. I was thankful for my Wii. I played lots of Wii Sports and a bit of Zelda. Unfortunately, my Wii began to show the black screen of death again. Bullocks. I played with the discs and it appears to be just Wii Sports. Oh well, more Zelda and Monkey Ball for me. If Nintendo has support people working on Thanksgiving I wasn’t about to call them. Let them relax for a bit.
Friday. Friday. Ah yes, the day when Gamestop told me they might have Wii’s back in stock. Well, I no longer wanted a Wii, but still was in search of an additional nunchuk controller. I figured showing up early would be nice. I arrived at 6:45am for a 7am store opening. There were six other folks in line. Three people had camped through the night. They were quite excited about getting their new Wiis. They started pimping me for answers when I revealed I bought a Wii on Monday. Lots of questions about Gamecube controllers and games too. “I don’t know, I’ve never bought a console before.” It got me thinking, I had planned on picking up a few Gamecube games, namely Super Smash Bros Melee, maybe I’ll look a bit more at them. 7am rolled around and the manager came out – “If you’re looking for a Wii or a PS3 and you’re not one of these two guys, go home. We don’t have any.” They had two Wiis and not a single PS3. Wow. These things were scarce. I got lucky on Monday.
After a long time browsing, because I know nothing about Gamecube games, I picked up six games and two wireless controllers. Total cost, about $50, same as a new Wii game. I now had Need For Speed: Underground, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4, Metroid Prime, Zelda Windwaker, Williams Arcade Classics, and of course Super Smash Bros Melee. I nearly choked over the $27 cost of Super Smash Bros – but at least I got it as part of a buy 2 get 1 with the controllers. I got home and started to play my other new games. For the most part the graphics were comparable, but they just didn’t feel right. I love racing games, but Need For Speed: Underground just feels dirty. Even Super Smash Bros isn’t quite the fun I remember. Make no mistake, I’ll love whooping up on people until Super Smash Bros Brawl comes out, but they didn’t seem as nice and clean as the Wii games.
Throughout the course of the afternoon, I played numerous Gamecube games with no problems. “Well, at least my Wii isn’t broken,” I thought to myself. It can read Gamecube games just fine, and actually, I realized, it wasn’t having any problems with Zelda or Super Monkey Ball. Wii Sports was just getting worse. That night I decided that maybe my entertainment center had gotten too messy. Something needed to be done. The MythTV Box had to move back into the entertainment center and the Wii couldn’t be sitting on top of it. The stereo, which was brought down for the Wii also should be moved into the entertainment center – previously we just used a set of computer speakers on the MythTV box. The problem is that not everything would fit, so it was time for some carpentry.
Saturday morning I got up, took down all the stuff from the entertainment center cleaned it out and started to hatch a plan. Armed with a trusty jig saw, a drill, and a dust buster, I began to carve a few holes in my entertainment center. This would needed for running some cords and ventilation. After about an hour of work, the system was put back together, unused items removed, cords cleaned up, and looking much neater. The Wii was alone on top of the center and the MythTV box was nicely hidden. However, Wii Sports still wouldn’t read. I was starting to get angry and worried. What if my Wii is broken and won’t ever work well? How long will it take to get a new one? Luckily, I found stories of folks who had defective units that were getting new ones overnighted from Nintendo – way to go big N.
Sunday was fairly non-descript as there was little Wii use due to church, yard work, and enjoying the nice weather. That evening I tried my daily fitness test on Wii Sports…Well, sorta. I couldn’t get the disk to load for a long time. After 10 tries, rebooting the Wii, unplugging the Wii, and trying a voodoo hex, I retreated to the cesspool that is general internet message boards. Yup, I started to look at WiiChat.com. Wow, this could be a great resource. Well, it could if you could filter out the kiddies who post incoherent replies to messages that try to start flame wars. I found that, to my surprise, there was a small but substantial community of folks who were experiencing the same problem, just with Wii Sports. Something strange has got to be happening here.
Delving deeper I found dozens of non-sensical suggestions and of course the usual response from a 12 year old “put the disk in the write way you moron”. A few made some sense. Some people suggested turning the console. I thought about it, Wii Sports worked best when my console was flat. But if that’s the case, I’d definitely have a defective Wii. No, it looked like something else. Filtering through the suggestions I found one that looked promising, “Move the Wii away from speakers, the magnets in the speakers may be causing problems.” It all seemed to make some sense. My Wii was having problems when it was sitting right next to my crappy speakers. These speakers are not shielded and can easily cause problems with CRT displays. Oh the agony, I had my entertainment center looking so nice and neat. Now I’d have to move stuff.
Happy Wii Sports Title Screen
To my surprise, it worked. Wii Sports would read after only twice of doing the disk thing instead of some dozen of unsuccessful attempts. Rock on! But still, this issue with Wii Sports really bothered me. I called up Nintendo and was told by their automated system that I should try back later because they were getting lots of calls. The fact that it was 8:30pm EST probably didn’t help either. I’d have to wait.
That brings me to today. I waited until around Noon EST to make the call to Nintendo – figuring they were on the west coast and probably would get a decent number of support folks for 9am - 5pm shift. Within about a minute I was connected to a very helpful rep who walked me through some diagnostics. I put a lot of discs in and out and was not able to replicate the problem on the phone. I described the situation, what I knew about the system and my electrical engineering background, and why I thought it could be an EMF issue. Well,
Nintendo doesn’t have anything in their troubleshooting guide about EMF issues yet, but the rep thought it could affect the whole system and seemed to think that there is chance it could affect just a lone disc. Although, I’m a little skeptical about that, but whatever. Anyway, after talking to him, getting some game recommendations and previews of what’s coming soon for the Virtual Console (still awaiting a Mario Kart version), he said that they’d UPS me a new Wii Sports game at no cost. Wow, that’s great of them. So, in another few days, I’ll be the proud owner of two copies of Wii Sports – lets hope that at least one of them works.
Overall, my impression with the console has been quite positive. I really enjoy the game play, and the controllers work pretty well. The menu system provides ample feedback and is quite responsive. Zelda is an absolute blast to play. I’m about 20 hours into the game, and have completed two of the three temples thus far. I’ve been quite impressed with the graphics, but remember, I’ve never bought a console – and the only console I’ve ever owned was the Genesis.
As far as the social gaming aspect works, I haven’t really tried that out yet. My wife has played a few times and seemed to generally enjoy it. She had no problem at all with getting used to the interface. After about a thirty second tutorial, she had no problem creating her Mii. I still haven’t tried much of the whole group gaming action. We’ll try that this Friday when we have folks over.
It’s been a wonderful Wii filled week.
Update, Tuesday, November 28, 2006: Wii Sports is being silly and not working again. Oh well. Also, on the photos of the screen, you’ll notice two sets of five white dots at the top of the screen. That’s the IR emitters from the Wii Sensor bar.