Wii? Oui!

When my parents visited in September, they left some money in order to buy a Wii for the kids for Christmas. Ever since, roughly about once a week, I have received calls telling me that I've got to hurry to the shops and buy it because, pretty soon, there won't be any left! This came as a surprise to me because they are everywhere (even our local mini-supermarket is selling them).

A friend of my aunties (long story) works in Asda and informed my sister that that evening they would be receiving 10 (that's "ten") Wiis and that they would be quickly gone. My brother-in-law therefore went and queued outside Asda from 7:30am in order to be there at 8:30am when the store opened. He did this and got the last one! Now they tell me that they need a remote control but they are impossible to come by...how can this be? I explained this to the guy in the shop where I bought one a couple of weeks ago and he was surprised because, as far as he was concerned, they are everywhere.

Are Nintendo creating a demand by limiting their availability, or are they simply unable to keep up with demand in the UK? I found it amazing to hear such panic in my mother's voice when I told her that I'll wander down there and get one just before Christmas (it's only November for god's sake). So much so, that I bought one early because I started to get tense about it myself (because it was her money I was spending and she would have been upset if I screwed up).

Anyway, we bought said Wii while the kids were at my father-in-law's house during the school holiday's (oh, what bliss). After bringing it home, we wanted to try it out (well who wouldn't). It comes pre-packaged with a set of sports games (I'm not going to go into all the details of how you play them).

Needless to say me and my wife loved it, and what a couple of prats we must have looked, moving aside the furniture, essentially to play "air-tennis" on a console with child-like graphics that reminded me of my old ZX Spectrum days.

I was one of the first people to get a Spectrum (I never had a ZX 80 or 81). It was September 82 and my parents had to send back 3 of them (you could only get them by mail order) before we got one that worked. However, once I was up and running (or sitting down in this case), the games were simple and really addictive (try getting emulations of Hungry Horace, Manic Miner or Jumping Jack if you don't believe me). You bought them on cassettes and downloaded them onto your Spectrum with a tape recorder. Bliss. Oh what fun we had staying inside on rare sunny days instead of playing outside.

Anyway, you felt like you were on the front of a wave when you were playing games with your Spectrum - you knew that everyone (well, geeky teenagers anyway) wanted one and the games would just get better and better (especially when you could get versions with 48K memory).

I should mention that I have never played on a Playstation or an Xbox, so my game console knowledge is pretty sketchy. However, playing on the Wii with its fun games and dodgy graphics made me feel like I was on the crest of a similar wave that would change the way people used their consoles and that things could only get better (cue dodgy song).

I can't wait for Christmas to see what a "real" Wii game looks like...from a geeky 14-year old to a geeky 40-year old in the space of only 26 years!