1. Buying
2. Setup
3. Playing

I had pre-ordered, so I decided to not go and get it at midnight. Was really tired last night.

This morning around 10:30 (when I thought the gamestop opened) I went off to the store. There was a line, but not a long one. Unfortunately it turned out that the store opens at 11 on Sundays. Curses!

Shortly before 11, someone showed up to open it up. She immediately announced that they only had consoles for the pre-orders. A third of the line left. Eventually I got in and to the front of the line. It turned out that they didn't have extra controllers or the Zelda game except for pre-orders. Curses!

After buying my console (mine I say!) and a copy of Super Monkey Ball (this is a very good game for groups of people, really), I headed to Target. Target doesn't do pre-orders and people strangely tend not to even remember they carry console gaming stuff. When the DS Lite came out (and sold out a lot of places quickly), I was able to just walk into the Target and buy a couple.

Target had wii remotes (but no nunchuck attachments, curses!) and the Zelda game (success!) So I went home. And started opening it up. I couldn't tell from teh manual for sure, but it looked like I needed an SD card to save game data. I don't have any SD cards. Curses!

We had other errands to run and while were were out I stopped at Best Buy to get one (Target, which is closer, didn't seem to have any). Is $15 for a 1GB card a decent price?

Random aside: While I was typing that paragraph, Family Guy had a segment where Mayor Adam West was using a cat launcher to chase off a pizza guy.

Setup

Anyway, after many errands we came home and I started re-setting up. It was quite nifty when it turned on. I wanted to see if the Opera browser which is rumored to be free would be available yet. So, I was somewhat annoyed that when I tried to setup the internet access it kept downloading more updates. Curses! After one update, it prompted me for my country (why hadn't it asked that at the initial setup?) and I still wasn't good at controlling the controller and accidentally set it to Anguilla. Then it loaded another update. Curses!

Finally, I loaded a game and it seemed to be really confused (slow loading, skipping music, mysterious pauses). Finally it froze up. So, I followed the time honoured method and just booted the thing. That fixed everything.

Playing

So far, we've only played a few party games from Super Monkey Ball and I've played one world (10 levels) of the main game. The mini-games are problematic because each one has slightly different rules for the gestures that do things. The intro bit for each that explains the controls is not always clear. Bowling for instance is basically a bowling motion. But the explanation of the gesture wasn't that clear. We sat with our heads scratching for a bit. Turns just mimicking bowling worked fine. Some of the other games were much more straightforward (there are like 50 or something!)

The main game was just really easy to control. It's basically a much more complicated form of that labyrinth and marble game where you tilt the board around to guide the marble to a hole. Only, you control a monkey in a transparent ball (technically you're tilting the ground on which he is moving). And it isn't so much a maze as an obstacle course. Yes, it sounds lame when described but is actually a lot of fun. In the original game, you used an analog stick to "tilt" everything. With the wii controller thing, you just twist your wrist left/right for those directions. And then move the front up/down to get forward/back tilts. They added jumping and birds which can blow you off, which means I died a couple places in the first set of levels, but otherwise it was just incredibly simple.

I haven't played the most important game -- Zelda: Twilight Princess -- because I'm afraid that if I start it, I wouldn't be able to stop for a while. And there was actually new Family Guy tonight (which is quite funny so far). But family guy just ended, so time to wrap this up, post it and go play! Update [2006-11-20 0:37:6 by R343L]:It seems that the husband is going to play Super Monkey Ball. I'll be forced to wait. Horrors!