Joining the Midnight Launch - Bought Wii without pre-ordering After chatting to a friend online, I was pretty bored and went to local Moore Park Supacentre to take a look and see what's the fuss of the midnight launch of Nintendo Wii. I did not pre-order a Wii but then I'm hooked by the games and the system itself so I thought I maybe lucky to get one without pre-ordering it. I went there and waited on the queue outside the EB Games shop. I waited for about probably 20 minutes and the reason it took so long was because the shop manager wanted to process all the customers who had pre-ordered first and I and another bloke was the last to get the Wii. I forked out AU$396 on credit card (hurray for interest free period!! account payable in 40 days ...) and out I went. I did not get any accessories and extra games because I think I may be able to get them cheaper at Target or BigW later. But I do get a Wii VIP card from EB Games and supposedly EB will have promotion every month or two or so. The current special deal is $20 off Tony Hawks skateboarding - which is not my cup of tea. The salesman was trying to get me to pay $60 for a 2 year extra warranty offered by EB Games. I asked, "Does it cover the TV damage if my Wiimote flys off my hand and breaks it?". "No. lol" was the answer. Guess I don't need it then. Here Wii go Top 10 Not-so-obvious Observations

1. The game disc itself does not seem readable by normal DVD-ROM drive (on my Macbook at least).
2. Wireless connection onto the Internet is straight forward to setup. As a true Microsoft Windows user, the first thing I do before playing Wii Sports was to do a System Update thru the Internet connection. It takes around 15 minutes to complete (not sure how much the download was...)
3. Browsing the Wii Shop Channel (to buy classic games) is a tad slow, from clicking a link to the link being loaded completely takes 3-5 seconds. Maybe everyone else just bought the Wii has been overloading the server.
4. You can HANG your Wii - when I was typing this blog, the Wii Shop Channel was hanging for more than 10 minutes to try connecting to the channel and it seems like to get out of this hanging state is to reset the Wii - ouch.
5. The news and forecast channel is not working yet - needed to wait for the service to be activated.
6. Wiimote does not need any calibration and magically it just works. IT seems to do calibration when you are trying to click on the first button on the screen.
7. The Wiimote, for my configuration at least, is only good for a range of 3 metres, which is pretty short.
8. In Wii Sports, there is a "Wii Fitness" mode which lets you undertake challenges by playing the sports included (such as finishing a spare in ten-pin bowling). After a set of exercises, it gives you a score, Wii Fitness Age, this is the age after my first go:
   
   I have never felt so old in my life until now....
9. I am tired after two hours of playing of the Wii Sports. I can already justify my buying decision - FITNESS. Please, create a Kinetic port for Wii!
10. There is this frequent warning in Wii Sports: "Make sure there are no people or objects around you that you might bump into while playing". Pretty hard to do when playing 4-player tennis I would think...

Top 5 Thoughts

1. Must start looking for cheap Gamecube accessories (controllers) and games such as Mario Party from ebay.
2. Must look for cheap deals on rechargable AA batteries and charger in electronics store - I have a feeling that the battery on Wiimote won't last long.
3. While we are all in the Ashes Series mode, I am looking forward to Ricky Ponting International Cricket 2007 and see what kind of cricket game they can make out of Wii. If they can fit a baseball game in Wii Sports, it cant be hard to make one for cricket.
4. Will there be a ultimate work out game for Wii, using a Dance Dance Resolution dance mat, Eyetoy-variant camera and Wiimote+nunchuck? Considering that all three can be used on the PC I am looking forward to any potential homebrew game using all of these input-methods.
5. Play around the Wiimote with PC/Mac sometime.