Wii Pre-ordered
The day before yesterday, I heard that most of the local Gamestop stores I’ve been tracking would be getting anywhere between 30 to 50 Wii’s per store. “Awesome!! This won’t be anything like the PS3 pre-orders!” I thoguht to myself as the same answer kept popping up from each store I called. “We’ve learned our lesson when it comes to console launches from the Xbox 360 release,” stated a local Gamestop manager.
Last night, I made my final calls to each of the same stores to see see what the final count of how many Wii units each would be receiving. I nearly dropped the phone when I heard “8,” come from one of the closest stores, the one I had planned on camping out in front of. A tad speechless, I made my second call. “14,” was the reply this time, and ever other store in town. It looks like my first call was just bad luck or sorts. Nevertheless, I called my buddy who was going to be camping this one out with me to tell him the bad news. So we set our arrival time to be a tad earlier than we had originally planned. I’m not a morning person, by the way. Neither is Phil, but he apparently had more will-power than I.
I received the call at 5am. Phil was on his way. So I hopped up, took a shower and dragged my butt to Starbucks where I nabbed a few coffees and made my way over to Gamestop.
When Phil got there, there were already three guys waiting (together). 5:15am mind you. They had been there since 9pm the night before. That had to be a tad disheartening to find that the next people to arrive, come eight hours later. Nevertheless, only one of them was actually getting the Wii. By 6:45am, we had eight people there, only six pre-ordering, mind you (I, being the fifth since I was still waking up). We had our 14 people by around 8am.
The store manager arrived around 8:30 and took our names down which freed us up to go get into our cars to warm up. By then, the sun was up and starting to chase the cold away, not very efficiently, might I add. This made me feel really bad for those three guys mentioned earlier. It had to be around 30 to 40 degrees (F) through the night. Enough to frost our yards over a little.
So, when 10am rolled around, we went inside and paid up. Good fun. I was debating if I wanted to get the classic controller, since it is only $20. I told myself that it turned out to be more, I would not be getting it. Good for Nintendo. Despite this, I only preordered the system and and one additional “controller set” (remote and nunchuck). My plans include buying two more sets and a multiplayer game when the reviews start coming out. My group of friends and I tend to really enjoy the 4-player action on the GameCube. I have no reason to think that the Wii’s equivalent would be any less fun. Besides, I’d already ordered Zelda a few days back… of course!
Now, I’m really tired. But that’s alright - I have a Wii pre-order.