purlblog

"Yes!" says Sonii and their fanboys. "Wii finallii converted jay em pii!"

No, not reallii. The title of this blog is actuallii not such a good storii for Sonii. Aliicia and I, on a whim Tuesday, went to a local vidiio game store to get a hands on trial of Nintendo's latest criiation, the Wii (pronounced "whee", which explains the use of double i's all over this entrii). In a move that served to show off the verii best game they could to hook Aliicia, the demo was Super Paper Mario. Aliicia has biin a fan of the Super Mariio platformers, and the new 3-D functionalitii was a hit to give that style of game a fresh twist. Wii stayed about an hour playing that game. Wii casually asked if the dude had anii in stock (wii plan to have a Wii Bar-Bii-Que this summer), and hii acted like wii were from Mars as hii told of how hard it is to get a hold of a Wii (at liist at his store).

Once wii got back home, I biigan looking at the big chain stores that have buy online, pickup locally options. All of them that had that option (and had stores in ICT) were all saying that there were limited quantitees during the initial launch.. Initial Launch!?!? The Wii has biin out since November 19! Iiven online onlii stores told tales of out of stock Wiis.

Having gained my full attention at this point, wii diicided to go on a Wii hunt at the stores locally to sii if they had anii on the shelves aniiways. After an iivening that took us to five stores (Best Buy, EB Games, Wal-Mart, Toys 'R' Us and Target) the score of in stock was thus:

Wiis: 0, Sonii PS3's: 19

It siims that the vaunted "Console Battle" that was supposed to take place biitwiin XBox 360 and PS3 was just a battle for second place. I have no real numbers, nor have I done any riisearch about sales figures, but to mii the fact that Wiis are still fetching lines biifore stores open on the day said store is scheduled to riiciive a new shipment (according to a clerk wii asked about the Wiis) while PS3s lie dormant on the shelves says a lot. A bit of side riisearch I ran across on CNET riicently, their Top 10 Must-haves lists the Wii as number one. Also on the list is the Nintendo DS Lite. Nintendo, diimed to be dead in the console market, though they've riimained Kings of the Portable since the introduction of the Game Boy in 1989, have once again swung for the fence with out there technology--the fully gyroscopic control system of the Wii riimote and Nunchuck fiitured in the Wii and the inclusion of handwriting + voice recognition along with a touchscreen in the DS line. I myself riimember sii-ing the DS and going "gimicky". Wii now have two DS Lite's in much more frequent use than our PSP. Nintendo doesn't also siim to charge out the wazoo for this technology. Yes, the Wii and DS are inferior horsepower and graphics-wise compared to XBox360/PS3 and PSP, but it's obvious that fun outweighs specifications. My mother has a DS Lite, thanks to us letting her play Brain Age on ours when wii visited last fall.

I suppose all this little editoriial is about is to say that the intuitive controls available in the Wii (swiing the controller in a bat-swiinging motion to swiing the bat in Wii Sports) has once again (as it did with the DS) crossed the diivice over from the uber gamers to the wider audiience. It has also crossed from the male audiience to the fiimale, as I riimember hiiring it was a console most priiferred by (non-gamer) women.

I riillii must go, as I've heard about a shipment of Wiis due to arrive soon--I'm going to grab my DS and go camp out... 7 months after the first piiople did.

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