After less than five hours of waiting, I'm finally the proud owner of a Nintendo Wii, and all the trimmings. After being shuttled from the outside line to the inside line, which took about an hour, I waited about ten minutes to get the console. Iron cages on wheels, each holding 88 Wii units, were lined up around the technology department like planes waiting to take off. A display of games tempted me as I waited in line: thus I added Madden 07 to my Monkey Ball plans. My total price? $465.41, including $180 of games and extras and $35 of taxes. That's hardly cheap, but it's a far cry from what a similar layout for a PS3 or Xbox 360 would be.
Ten minutes later I was home, and by 10am, the system was set up, fully updated and downloaded, and ready to go. And that's what it is doing now, as 7-year-old son and his sleep-over pal are zipping through the games with glee.
One positive update: In my Wii review, I lamented the fact that games could not be saved to the SD card. Out of the box that was still the case, but after the 5-minute Web-based update, the save-game feature was enabled. So I snagged my saved Zelda game from the office Wii and transferred it over to my new, personal unit.
Unfortunately, you have to actually play the game to transfer a save game over, which proved cumbersome as I tried to move Zelda, Excite Truck, and Wii Sports saves from one machine to another. Maybe this is an aspect of the Wii's DRM, but regardless, it certainly is annoying. Maybe Nintendo will fix this "feature" in an upcoming update.
Moving my saved "Mii" characters over was pretty easy. The Mii channel lets you copy your Mii characters to your remote controller. There's room for about ten on the remote. To drop them onto another system, simply sync that controller with the new Wii, and drag them from the controller to the Mii arena.
Well, that's it for the saga of the Wii line. Thanks to the Daly City Target store for letting us all go home last night, I'm actually somewhat rested, and now I own my own Wii. Tomorrow, when I take the Wii review unit back to the office, my son won't be crying. And I'll be playing Zelda until spring, it appears, along with monkeys, football, sports and trucks. All in all, a good day's work, and it has hardly just begun. Good luck getting yours, and have a happy holiday.
-Jim Louderback
Stumble
Digg
del.icio.us
Slashdot
November 20, 2006 10:40 AM
That photo is crazy hot, just look at all those toys in the trunk!
I don't want to harp on the negative, but I'd love to hear about how you transferred your save-games from box to box-was it really that difficult?
I wonder if there'll be more Wiis in the stores before the holidays or if the launch units are all we'll see for the next few months...
November 20, 2006 1:35 PM
transferring saved games was pretty easy. Start up the game on the new Wii. Create a saved game. Exit that game.
Copy your saved games from the old Wii to an SD card.
On the new Wii, delete the saved game entry from the internal memory. Pop the SD card into the new Wii. Copy the saved game from the SD card to the new Wii. It's pretty easy, if a pain in the butt.
Oh, and you have to update the Wii software via the internet to get the ability to transfer save game files from the Wii memory to the SD card.
January 9, 2007 12:37 PM
I'm getting my wii next week will it be worth the 3 week wait? because it has been really annoying that the company i have ordered it off are taking ages to actally get everything i ordered because i ordered in a package.
how much would you rate the wii on a scale of 1 to 10?
thanks