woo hoo! 18 of 40, I pick it up in 30 minutes!
(got what a long cold colorado night…30 degrees F from 2am to 7am)
The first guy here’s been here since 7am yesterday. When they started handing out the vouchers, there was still 8 consoles unaccounted for.
Just got back from Best Buy here in Tampa with a Wii in hand. Picked another controller and nunchuck accessory. Also picked up Zelda and that was it for me.
Just on a whim I decided to see how many people were camped out in front of Best Buy around midnight. There weren’t too many people there and I sat in my car arguing with myself for 15 minutes on whether or not to go out there and get in line. Stupidity won out in the end and I waited in the cold for a good nine hours to get one.
It wasn’t too bad. Everyone was nice and friendly and joked around the entire time. The store had 87 Wii’s to sell. I was number 17 according to the ticket I was handed. About 20 to 30 people were turned away. While it was fun I am never doing that again. Now to get some sleep and then set up the console and kick Gannon’s ass all over Hyrule.
Congratulations to all you lucky bastards who got your Wiis today. I was contemplating waiting outside for one, waking up at 5am to wait for the Toys “R” Us in Wayne, New Jersey (“Home of Toys ‘R’ Us”) to open in 5 hours. There were around nine or ten people already lined up, based on the recon mission I did the night before. I decided against it though, as 1) I didn’t want to wake up that early 2) the odds of getting one weren’t really in my favor 3) the really good games don’t come out until Christmastime. But I congratulate you Dopers who joined New Yorker Isiah Triforce Johnson, the first American to buy a Wii (that’s really his middle name- he changed it to “Triforce” to show his love of Nintendo) and Los Angelean Mario who became part of the few, the proud, the Wii-owners. Congratulations to you Teeming Wiilions.
Oh, and if you bought a PS3, I guess that’s okay, too.
Everyone that got a Wii - go play it and tell me if it’s awesome or not! I am really thinking about getting one next year but I want to know more about how it works before I take the plunge. The ease of downloading and playing older games is very important.
I think a couple guys at my work camped out for them last night. Hopefully they’ll be in today to gush.
My roommates and I all went in and reserved a copy at Gamestop about a month ago, and the one who got the short straw to pick it up last night at midnight was haield with much cheering when he returned (yeah, I know, we didn’t have to make him wait to get it at midnight, since it was reserved, but we wanted it as soon as possible.) I don’t think we’ve tried Wii Sports at all, just doen Red Steel, which I love. We’re getting Zelda tomorrow (had that reserved as well, but not by the guy who picked up the Wii, and you can’t claim another person’s reservation, obviously.)
One thing I don’t understand about Red Steel, though…why is there sword fighting? I mean, yeah, it’s cool and fun,. but within the context of the game, why is it there? I HAVE GUNS! Why am I going to waste time fighting with my sword if I can just shoot the bastard?
Dude, if there’s one thing sci-fi movies and anime has taught me, it’s that the sword is the ultimate weapon. It does everything. It blocks bullets, laser beams, cuts open doors in walls, you can shave with it, spread butter on your english muffin with it… what can’t you do with a sword?
Both me and my wife are totally enjoying our Wii. Downloading old games is a snap, I grabbed original Zelda today. I went ahead and got a points card, I haven’t tried it with directly inputting my credit card.
She’s mostly played Wii Sports, I’ve been playing Code of Honor. It’s a blast. I started with Zelda, but I didn’t really have the time to devote to it. I can tell it will be a life stealer.
I picked mine up from a Walmart at midnight last night (five hour line wait) and so far I’m pretty positive. The Walmart I went to didn’t receive their shipment of games and no one in the area received their shipment of controllers. I went to three more Walmarts (the only place in the area open at midnight for the launch if you didn’t get a preorder in) and Zelda was gone at all of them. I did get Marvel Ultimate Alliance and Trauma Center to go with the Wii. I’ll probably pick up Zelda sometime this week as it becomes more widely available.
As an interesting note, all the Walmarts in this area seem to have gotten only half their initial allocation for midnight. I think this was Walmart’s logistic problems rather than a failure of supply on Nintendo’s part.
Covering the console first, no matter what you put in the console starts at a Wii Home menu. Annoying that it doesn’t go right to the game, but nice in that you can get to the home menu from a game and switch things around with out shutting down the console. The home button on the Wiimote takes you there or resets the game itself.
The Wii Home is a set of “channels” and the first one is always the game disk. Then there is a place to set up your custom game avatars or “Mii”. The Mii’s are surprisingly flexible with a lot of facial options and ways to manipulate it. I made mine look like the devil by turning a pair of giant eyebrows into devil horns, for example.
So far I have been unable to get the Wii’s wireless connectivity to work. It detects my router, I enter my WEP security key, and the Wii just comes back with a vague error that Nintendo’s support pages offer no information on. I have tried disabling security and it still doesn’t go. So I haven’t been able to check out the internet connectivity and the virtual console yet.
The Wiimote is what the console is going to rise and fall on and so far it’s been a thing of beauty for me. It’s light enough to fit comfortably in your hand. The A and B buttons are placed for a natural grip. There’s a power button on the wiimote so you can turn the console on from across the room which is a nice feature.
The most awkward thing about the Wiimote is that some things use the infrared triangulation of the sensor bar and others use the position tracking. So sometimes people walk in front of the TV and control vanishes and in other games you can flip the control around and it works right. It’s odd.
A strap is included for the Wiimote and everything warns you to make sure it is attached to your wrist so you won’t smash something.
Wii Sports is what I expected it to be, a clever tech demo but not a really deep game. There isn’t much in the way of helpful instruction on techniques for playing better in the game which is unfortunate since the way you twist and adjust the Wiimote in your hands seems to effect things. Even the training section just tells you to do a task, not how to do it better.
My favorite is probably the boxing because it’s the most active but the golf section is wonderfully done as well. I wouldn’t mind an updated Mario Golf with the same controls and a few courses since Wii Sports only has 9 holes. The baseball is probably the least effective of the games implemented as only pitching and batting work and they seem to only track the flick of the Wiimote, not position of the switch or way you are throwing. The tennis one isn’t that special but at least I feel like I’m controlling how I’m returning the ball. And bowling… well I can never bowl straight in real life and on the Wii it is identical. It looks like a perfect translation there.
Trauma Center kind of threw me off because of the very limitted voice acting and no animation in the cut scenes between operations. It wound up feeling more like an upconverted DS game than a platform for using the Wiimote in unique ways like I was hoping for. The operation sequences (at least the first ten of them) play like a series of minigames. As it turns out it makes a very good compliment to Wii Sports for demonstrating the Wiimote. The controller is used like defibrillator paddles, forceps, syringes, and scalpels in turn giving it a distinct feel that wouldn’t be possible with more traditional controllers.
Marvel Ultimate Alliance is what I’d expect from a launch title, a general lack of polish and failure to take advantage of what the system offers. It’s a good game and if you liked the two X-Men games that preceded it then you’ll enjoy MUA, but there’s a lot of rough edges. The first major problem is the text is about the size of the fine print in a car ad. The game uses the Wiimote with nunchuck for control and the interface is sloppy. Not the responsiveness of the Wiimote (that works perfectly), but the decisions they made for control. The stick on the nunchuck moves the character and the Wiimote controls the actions. Except picking things up and using things, that’s back on the nunchuck. You access the character menus on the Wiimote, but select on nunchuck. And you back out of the selection on the Wiimote. Which type of attack you do is controlled by moving the Wiimote, only moving the Wiimote back to a neutral position often triggers a different attack. There are two action buttons on the Wiimote; a more reasonable implimentation of this would be to track the position of the Wiimote and do the appropriate attack when you hit the top action button. And, of course, layout the menu controls in an intuitive fashion. And as one final insult you cannot use a Gamecube controller with the game. This is an instance were letting people use a traditional controller would have been a very good idea, especially since playing four players would cost almost as much as another Wii. It’s still a decent game but it’s not one for showing what you can do with the Wii.
I did try out the game cube virtual console with Metroid Prime and it seems to work very well, so those without a gamecube, remember that there’s a nice selection of software still out there!
Heck, i’m taking mine into the office. Here’s my gut feeling after having it (referring ot the right screen) 3 hours and 45 minutes:
Super monkey ball: Cool, would look better with the composite cables. Some movements were a bit extreme to handle, but not bad.
Wii sports: Great technical demo of it’s capabilities. The games are pretty light weight…e.g. in baseball, don’t expect to control the players in the field, or rounding the bases. However, the way the bat duplicates your control’s movements is GREAT.
The controllers control ALL degrees of motion, and seem to do so well. I can’t get over how SMALL this thing is, compared to my Xboxen.
Like it so far, but the games are for the kids (two 4 year olds who are doing a REAL good job of picking up the mechanics), I’ll need something a little more engrossing for me. Either Zelda, or a couple of used gamecube games.
My husband pre-ordered our Wii about a year ago. No kidding, he was the first on the list at Game Crazy and I think it was still referred to as the Nintendo Revolution at the time.
Game Crazy was going to open at 9 or 10am and my husband and my son were going to wake up early to pick up the console and a few more games (We’ve been staring at Red Steel and Rayman on the coffee table for days now).
Yesterday afternoon Game Crazy calls and asks if we’d like to pick up our Wii at midnight. Hell yeah, we want to pick it up at midnight.
We’ve had the Wii for less than 24 hours and our roommate has already sustained the first Wii-related injury in our household. I tried to get the Wii-mote (snerk) from her in the middle of an at-bat and tried to bat before she got the wrist strap off. I ended up clocking her knuckle pretty hard. Oops! :eek:
Golf is fantastic and bowling is also very fun. Baseball is okay, but I don’t care much for tennis. I haven’t tried boxing yet, but my husband says it’s pretty intense.
Zelda looks beautiful and Rayman is lots of fun (so says the husband and kid who were up until FIVE THIRTY THIS MORNING PLAYING! AAAH!)
Wii definitely gets a thumbs up from me. I’m excited to see what kind of titles launch in the next year or so and I think it may even break me being anti-Smash Bros.
It’s very exciting and I love the design of the controller. I haven’t used the nun-chuck yet, but it seems fairly intuitive as well.
I noticed something on mine, and the two people that were with me last night are saying the same thing, the disc slot isn’t glowing blue while playing. We all thought it was supposed to. I flashes blue when I power it up, but that’s it.
Is it working for anyone else? Minor quibble, just wondering mostly.
And I can answer my own question. Apparently it comes on when you have messages, or when it’s doing a software update while powered down.
So it doesn’t come on while playing.
A guy from work brought his Wii in tonight. I didn’t get to play it because I was busy, but I watched Wii sports being played. After work, I went over to a friend’s house and he had his Wii set up. I didn’t play it there either (opted to try Guitar Hero instead - holy crap why did I sell my PS2? That game is awesome!!!) but I got to watch my friend Dave play each of the Wii Sports games. He couldn’t get the wireless set up either, but he said he loves the controller and that it’s really sensitive and easy to use. But I thought the little Mii people look funny -some don’t have arms, some don’t have legs (like in the baseball one).
I’ll probably pick one up in a few months, mainly to download NES and other older games I miss terribly, and use the Classic controller a lot. I’d like to wait until more of the Wii games come out, none of the current ones interest me much.
Actually I got my wireless going about an hour ago finally. The Wii was incompatible with the 802.11g settings on my wireless router. Setting the router to use b worked.
So once I did that I had to check out the downloadable content. There were significantly less games available than had been mentioned as launch titles before but there are three gems in there and a few more that you wouldn’t have to hold a gun to my head to make me want to play it.
Here were the titles available:
NES ($5 each):
Donkey Kong
Legend of Zelda
Soccer
Pinball
Soloman’s Key
Mario Brothers
Genesis ($8 each):
Altered Beast
Sonic the Hedgehog
SNES ($8 each):
F-Zero
Sim City
N64 ($10 each):
Super Mario 64
The minimum purchase for “Nintendo Points” which is what you use to buy these items is $10 (or 1000 points).
Since the minimum purchase was $10 and I don’t have my Mario 64 cartridge any more I decided to use that to find out how well the virtual console worked. I was able to buy and download it in about three minutes (with a cute NES Mario running past and collecting coins as the progress bar).
You cannot use the Wiimote and Nunchuck to play any of the virtual console games. You need either the classic controller (sold seperately) or a Gamecube controller. I used a Gamecube controller and Mario 64 played perfectly. The only issue is that the virtual console did not add bars to the sides of my 16:9 screen so I had to switch the resolution manually. Otherwise it looked exactly like the original and played just like it ever did. I’m definitely getting any quality N64 games that hit the virtual console. Others are going to be dependent on if I’ve played them to death before or if I don’t already have a copy of the game that I can play on my Wii (Zelda and Sonic).
I forgot just one NES game from the list: Wario Woods. Still, a rather sparse launch line up and missing a few titles that I had read were on the confirmed list like Dungeon Explorer and the NES Ice Hockey
The big list if Virtual games was through the end of Dcember. I’d expect the number of available downloads to increase fairly soon.
Now, if I could just find an easy source for component cables, I’d be set! (I expect I’ll be hittin’ a game place and picking up some GC content soon. 
)
Sorry for the cryptic wording - what I meant was I don’t have any firsthand knowledge of the machine and its capabilities. My company is working on a wii title and we have had a dev kit for a couple months now, but I am on a different title so I get all my information second hand. Engineers on the team tell me that it could theoretically support 8 controllers, but the amount of processing power it would take would cripple the game. Of course its still a young system so who knows. Maybe by third gen? Mario Party 15?
Didn’t get it – no pre-order or anything – but after playing Wii Sports and Excite Truck for several hours I’ll say it is abso-frickin’-awesome. After playing a few rounds of Tennis (preferably with a friend or three), going back to conventional controllers feels positively primitive.
And the unofficial scuttlebutt is that Nintendo sold out nearly one million Wiis for the launch. :eek: