Today, while Christmas shopping for the kids, I’m pretty sure I saw some PlayStation 3s. I bought a pile of video games at Toys-R-Us on clearance, paying five bucks a pop for games that I’m sure the kids will play to death; Crash Bandicoot titles, Donkey Kong, etc.

Anyway, the way that do it at the local Toys-R-Us (and, I assume, at every Toys-R-Us) is, you don’t actually carry the game itself to the counter. You carry paper tickets with barcodes on them, and the sales clerk scans the tickets. Then, you take your tickets and receipt to the stock desk where a bored, bubblegum chewing stock clerk goes into the stock room and gets your games. When this particular stock clerk opened the door of the stock room I saw a shelf full of black boxes with a big sign that said "DO NOT MOVE BEFORE NOVEMBER 17!" I was able to clearly see that the boxes said PlaySta... something-or-other, but it was kind of a blur as the door opened and closed. I’m assuming that they were PS3s since the November 17th release date was so prominent.

We've never bought a new console before. Our Gamecube was bought three years after that system debuted, and our Xbox was bought two years after that system came out. Or, was it the other way around? Either way, we've never bought a new next-generation system before. We've promised the kids, though, that Santa is all about the Nintendo Wii this year, so I guess that means that I'll be spending about twelve or fourteen hours at the local Wal-Mart this Saturday so that we can see this under the tree on Christmas morning:

According to the Wii Seeker (which, oddly enough, is a free service of a PS3 site), our local Wal-Mart is getting 53 Wii consoles. We'll see. I hope it's really that many.


I know that a lot of smart gamers (including Rey) are PS3 enthusiasts... but we've decided on the Wii for sure for our family. We think it's just a better match for a family and a mix of casual gamers.

A big part of the reason we've decided on the Wii over the PS3 is price. The PS3 is the kind of system that you have to buy on mortgage. It's available in two versions; one with a sixty gig hard drive (it costs an arm and a leg) and one with a twenty gig hard drive (that one only costs a leg). The Wii, on the other hand, is a comparatively mild $250. Where Nintendo is going to make the big bucks on this system is in the controllers, which come in two parts, each of which is sold separately, and each of which costs ... well, a toe or two.

I know that the PS3 will play blu ray DVDs, but I don't really care. We're not buying a console to watch movies on, we're buying one for video games. Besides, the Wii will be playing DVDs as well by 2007. And, honestly, I don't care about that, either. Video game consoles are for video games, not movies. As someone pointed out at a bulletin board, nobody ever lamented that the N64 didn't play VHS tapes, or that the NES didn't play 8-Tracks.

As far as non-game capabilities, the Wii does do a few things. It has a messaging system, for one thing ... which is ... well ... kinda dumb. If you want to leave a message for someone in your home, you can either jot it on a piece of paper and leave it on the table ... or, if you're a Wii owner, you can fire up your Wii, use the remote to type out a message, save it, and then hope that the person you've written the message to will actually turn on the Wii and read it. As joystiq.com pointed out, it would be easier simply to write the message right on the side of the Wii than to use the console's message system:

The Wii will have a few multimedia capabilities out of the box. It will be able to read JPGs on memory sticks, which we'll never need to do, either, since we have one of them thar new-fangled Personal Com-Peuder thingies. Oh, the Wii can also play Quicktime movie files. Yay. One more device that will play the one video format that PC users despise most. If they could just get it to run AutoCAD, that would bring the Wii's list of things we'll never use it for up to three.

The advantages of the Wii are all in the interface.

For one thing, the hype indicates that this is apparently is a video game system that might involve some actual exercise. I hope I'm up to that. I'm typically a "Halo 2 and a bowl of Fritos balanced on my chest" kind of gamer. I hope I can hang with the kids as they jump around swinging the Wii remote playing video tennis, baseball, Metroid, etc. This seems to be a popular Wii selling feature with non-gamers. Even the old farts at Forbes have enjoyed jumping around with those odd looking little Wii controllers.

Another neat thing about the Wii is that it logs your cumulative play time for all of your games. That way, when you're trying to figure out if the sequel to Game X is a good investment, you don't have to wrack your brain trying to remember if the kids actually played the original version of Game X very often or not. You can just turn on the Wii and learn for sure, for once and for all, that, for instance, the kids have only spent a total of two hours playing that fifty dollar Shadow The Hedgehog game that they just had to have last Christmas ... meanwhile, that Kirby game that grandma bought them for $4 at a yard-sale has been played every day for sixteen months.

Just hypothetically, that is.

(They might as well play with the damn box.)

Wii Journal, Entry 01

Labels: Personal, Video Games