Dean's World

If anyone out there's got a Nintendo Wii and wants to swap Mii's or whatever you can find me at:

4911 0300 3657 3790

Just register it in your address book in your Wii Message Board.

If anyone has a Wii and wants to post their address in the comments section now is the time.

Hope to see some of you in the Plaza!

The Esmay family finally has the Nintendo Wii!

Along with, of course, the new Legend of Zelda.

We so happy.

Thanks to The Queen. I heard a rumor they'd be on sale this morning at our local Target. I wasn't sure I took it seriously and I wasn't gonna get up early on a Sunday morning just to see. But she decided she would go, especially because she loves shopping at Target anyway.

Lo and behold, the rumor was true!

It's a mighty impressive system so far...

*Update*: Damn, this thing is awesome! But now to get it online I need to figure out its wireless MAC ID since I use MAC address filtering for security. Anyone know how to look that up??

I notice that pretty much everyone I know who plays video games either has a Wii or, more often, badly wants one.

I don't know anyone with a PS3, and I don't know anyone who tells me they want one. Now it may be that everyone who has a PS3 has no desire to tell me about it, and had no trouble getting one and so had no reason to complain. Still, all I notice is that all the gamers I know--even the casual gamers like me--want a Wii, or have one and are thrilled with it.

At this point, the way I've been watching it go down, though, I'm pretty well convinced that Nintendo has created artificial shortages on their systems on purpose. I normally pooh-pooh such ideas because it seems intuitively like bad business sense. If nothing else, because if it backfired it would go very badly. A big "screw you, Nintendo" attitude might have been the result of these shortages, and people may have flocked to the Xbox 360 or the PS3 instead.

For my own part, for example, I have no significant loyalty to Nintendo as a company. I like their products, but they weren't the first video game company I bought from. I liked the PS1 and the PS2 from Sony a lot. Sony has pissed me off with the PS3 though--expecting me to drop $600 just for a base unit with no frills is ridiculous. The entry price point for a brand new video game system has been between $250 and $350 for years and years and years--what the Hell was Sony thinking?

It's obvious to me that Nintendo is playing a similarly dangerous game here. But they've won. It's obvious that their problem here isn't manufacturing issues. They're very intentionally releasing limited numbers of the system in order to build up desire and build up buzz. It's ballsy. By all rights people should be angry with them.

But somehow they've got enough market loyalty--and also a system that's just so damned good--that they're willing to brazen it out and intentionally create shortages in the product just to get people talking about it.

It is a beautiful system. It is very well-designed. It's so innovative on user interface that it's brought video gaming to a new level. Its internet integration is nearly seamless. The backward compatibility with not just Gamecube games but also all the old Nintendo, Sega, and even TurboGrafx-16 games is genius.

They've done something marvelous here. I really think that they're likely to be the dominant gaming platform by the end of this year.

I'm just stunned by how well they carried off this temporary artificial shortage right after the official launch. This could have backfired on them so bad they'd never recover. Instead it's just helped them get ahead. It's amazing.

I see that Xbox 360 is still king of the world. They easily outsold the Wii and the PS3 in November and December.