I didn’t manage to get a Wii on launch day, but I was more successful today. I got to a Best Buy at around 7:10, a mere 2 hours and 50 minutes before it opened; that was good enough to get me the 19th of 26 Wiis that they were handing out. Fortunately, I had several hours of podcasts stored up, so the wait was perfectly pleasant; not the sort of thing I’d want to do every day, or even every year, but I’m not complaining.

About that, at least. I am complaining that Nintendo didn’t ship any extra controllers along with the consoles. I mean, if they’re trying to get families playing together, they should have included a second controller in the box, but not even having extra controllers available for purchase is just ridiculous. So the Wii Sports pack-in is doing us no good whatsoever. And I think they made some basic, stupid mistakes with Super Monkey Ball. Zelda is pretty good so far, except for a fishing sequence which is exceedingly annoying. (Liesl is getting frustrated with it as I write this.) We also got Rayman Raving Rabbids, which I haven’t gotten around to trying.

Liesl, Miranda, and I all made Miis; yay. They didn’t have any beards that were sufficiently majestic (the ponytail options were fairly lacking as well, for that matter), but I’m happy enough with my mii. Too bad they didn’t integrate it more thoroughly into the game play – why am I not asked to pick a mii every time I play a game? (And then given the option to use the Mii’s personal info instead of having to type my name in over and over.)

It’s taking a little while to get used to the controller, but I like it fine so far. The DS keyboard interface has spoiled me, of course, but I can deal with that. I can understand why, at a couple of points, I had to enter a password in plain text, but it was still disconcerting.

Still too early to have much of a feel for the system.

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