11-20-06, 6:58 AM

I'm retired, I invented dice when I was a kid. What do you do?

Music: Groove Armada - Little by Little (Featuring Richie Havens)

What to Think updated, finally. This dog-and-pony show may be running out of steam.

Before I begin a very long story, I want to alert all of you to a deal that will be popping up on Amazon on Thanksgiving Day. They will be selling 1000 of the XBox 360 Core systems for $100. It's the Core system, yeah, but really all you need to do is buy a 360 hard drive for it and you're basically in the same boat as me, but you've effectively saved at least $200.

So all last night I debated whether or not I wanted to go stand outside and wait to get a Wii. The people claiming that since there would be so many of them you could just walk in and get one couldn't be more wrong. At about midnight Travis and I stopped by Wal-Mart for their midnight release where they promptly sold out in minutes to the line of about thirty people that had been standing around for a while. A little over an hour later we cruised the other big retail stores in South County, Best Buy had a couple dozen standing outside already, as did Toys R Us and Target. Idiots, I thought, everyone's saying there's going to be plenty to go around.
I got home and looked around the internet for shipment amounts to specific stores, only to get estimates saying that Toys R Us and Best Buy would be getting the bulk of the Wiis, with an average of 100 to 200 per store. I would find out later that this also could not be more wrong.

Around 6:00 AM I showed and got dressed debating for a good length of time about whether or not I wanted to go out and wait. I then cruised around again, the lines had grown at Best Buy, extending around the corner and almost into the loading bay. They had also gotten a little longer at Toys R Us. People were departing Target, having been given vouchers guaranteeing them a system. I return home and continue to mull it over. About an hour later I finally decide to give it a shot, and since I've read that Toys R Us will be getting "lots" that would probably be my best bet. It wasn't, and when I learned that I couldn't believe information I got off the internet from an anonymous source could possibly be incorrect.

I roll into the Toys R Us parking lot a little after 7 AM, wearing my standard T-shirt, long-sleeved shirt buttoned-up, and an Old Navy sweater underneath my buttoned P-coat. Below that I am wearing a single pair of jeans, which is not ideal thermal wear. It's overcast, roughly 36 degrees with a windchill putting it below freezing. Toys R Us doesn't open for two hours.

I join the line just seconds after a young couple does the same. Ahead of them is an old woman with a severely raspy voice as if she has been smoking a carton of cigarettes that have been deep fried every day of her life, probably even when she was in the womb. In front of her sits two guys probably in the early 30's, one is a stout, thick-skinned man in a Blues jacket and with him is a thin Asian man who says nothing the entire time I am there. Not long after another young couple get in line behind me, and then shortly after that Bill Murray's character from Caddyshack shows up behind them. Thirty minutes later Billy Murray is followed by Sir Richard Attenborough in a blue sweater and IBM baseball cap. It is a cavalcade of stars waiting for the Wii.

There's a buzz I did not expect outside of hardcore gamer internet junkies, many of these people look like actual normal folks who have no desire to resell it or in some cases give it as a present, they just want one. I learn couple behind me have a three-year-old daughter, but are not there to shop for her, this is for them. I begin to realize that Nintendo, before the system has even been released, has a solid hit on their hands. Good news for them, bad news for me trying to get one.

Word begins to circulate, as the night shelf stockers begin to leave at about forty-five minutes before opening, that the store has sixty consoles. Beef McLargehuge, the one in front of Cancerwoman, inform everyone that at least 25 of them had been pre-sold. His sidekick Short Round remains stoic. A woman up front does a headcount of the line, someone asks where that would put the end of the line, and she waves around my general area. I am nervous.

At about 8:30 the store manager comes out to inform everybody that, excluding pre-sales, they only have thirty systems to sell. They tell everyone that it is limit one per customer, one per household, with no actual way of verifying the latter. They begin letting people in one at a time, starting with half a dozen and then adding another as soon as someone checks out. This continues to drag on for several minutes. The line stops when it gets to Short Round and his thick pal, and the guy handing out the tickets does a count, coming out to say that availability will be ending, as he puts his hand directly in front of me in a cutting motion, here. He then hands out the rest and apologizes to everyone. Bill Murray pats me on the shoulder and asks "Hey, man, how bad does that feel?" In retrospect I probably should've punched him.

I slowly make my way back to my car when I look to the right, seeing the large Best Buy sign above the smaller buildings, just a block away. I've come this far, I figure, and they're just opening up now as well. I jump into my car and pull out of the parking lot as fast as I can, quickly glancing to see no traffic coming my direction and speeding by the stop sign turning right. The stoplight ahead turns yellow as I approach and I blow through it just in time. I pull into the parking and grab the first available spot, also seeing in the corner of my eye a woman getting out of her car. I book it for the end of the line on the other end of the store. One of them shouts "Come on, man, there's only one left" to me. I get there just in time for a Best Buy employee to hand me a reserve ticket and then hear the woman being told that they were now officially out of stock. She turns back to her car, sullen and angry. I feel guilty, but I reconcile with that by reasoning that, since I didn't see her at Toys R Us, at least she can probably still feel her toes.

It takes about an hour to weave through the line, where Best Buy employees hand us buyer's brochures listing all the launch games and accessories, as well as some coupons offering $5 off certain titles. We get through and sitting in the middle of the aisle are a few tables lined up with games and accessories, with the system waiting at the, and we are given shopping baskets. They are completely sold out of nunchuk controllers and have plenty of copies of every game left. I grab Call of Duty 3, mostly for my father, and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, the latter they easily had way more copies of than they had systems, sign my reserve ticket and I am handed a system. I check out, racking up a bill of $373.

I make it home after 10 AM, and I've been up for 18 hours. I carefully unpack the system, keeping the different elements in their places knowing that there's an 80% chance I'll end up selling it and getting one later. I hook it all up and play through all the Wii Sports games which are, as everyone has been claiming, very fun. Though it doesn't take long to realize that the slight delay problem with the new 42" plasma HDTV we got is really going to have an effect on this system. This is a problem with virtually every HDTV on the market for game systems, there will be a small amount of lag, usually only 8ms, between when you do something with a controller and the action actually takes place. With the XBox 360 it's only slightly noticeable but completely playable, the Wii is a different story, considering you are doing some kind of action virtually every second. Getting an accurate swing in the baseball portion requires you to actually swing sooner than you normally would, and even then I was hitting mostly foul balls. This rendered Call of Duty 3 nearly unplayable, since the turning sensitivity is too high to begin with, but not having tight control meant I'd spend more time turning left or right than when I really want to. Hooking it up to the other, standard CRT TV in the room alleviated that problem, but I don't know if I can go back to that after spending the last couple weeks gaming at 1080i on a 42" screen.

I do believe the Wii is a good system, and I do believe that it will capitalize on its potential, it's just that the launch line-up is full of, well, launch titles. I've spent way too much money already in these last few weeks, I should really try and concentrate on taking care of my credit card debt. The only real system seller out there now is Zelda, and since at this point I had already resigned to selling it, I didn't want to start playing it when I'd have to start over when I eventually get it again. With four million expected to be released worldwide before the year's end and more coming, there will be no problem getting ahold of one again in the near future, so off to eBay it goes.

I guess you could say I had buyer's wiimorse.

no more parachutes