The girls are downstairs playing their 300th game of Wii Sports baseball, so I have a few minutes to blog about our adventures in buying a console game system on launch day.

The girls had Hebrew School this morning, so we didn’t get to EBGames until around 1:30 pm. Turns out, we were the last ones to pick up our pre-order. The salesman said that there were people camped out when he arrived to open the store that morning. Unfortunately, he only got in pre-orders, so those without were out of luck. He said a few stayed for a while and tried to buy consoles off of others. No takers.

Anyway, we ordered an extra wiimote and nunchuk, and only the extra remote came in. Rapala fishing isn’t here yet (due 11/22). I switched out Zelda for Monkey Ball Banana Blitz. I know Zelda is the big game for this thing, but I know we wouldn’t have gotten our money’s worth out of it. I just don’t have the time to invest in it. I also went for the $30 warranty. Normally, I don’t bother with those things but for a system that my kids (and probably some of their friends) will use a lot, it may be worth it. I lost my Trauma Center pre-order because I couldn’t get to the store to get it on Wednesday or Thursday. They hold for 48 hours and that’s it. Nevermind that I obviously was going to come in for the console until Sunday. Oh well. It was another $50 I didn’t need to spend right now. What we have will keep us more than busy, plus we have a GameFly subscription to try out other games.

Setting it up was easy…except I think there’s something wrong with our TV. Video 1 is the DVD player, Video 3 is the DVR. Video 2 is on the front of the TV. With the Wii plugged in to Video 4 (back) the picture was horrible and I was getting some “bleed through” from the cable box. When I plugged into Video 2 in the front, I could only get a picture if the yellow video cable was in just right the right position and pulled a little to the right. As soon as I let go, the picture disappeared. So what did I do? I taped the cable down into the position that the Wii stayed on the screen. Let Eric figure it out on Wednesday.

Absolutely nowhere in the documentation (that I found) does it say to get the keyboard on screen during set up, you need to hold down both the A and B switches at the same time. I spent a good 15 minutes trying to figure out how to enter the nickname of the console. I think I hit both keys together purely by accident to figure it out.

The Wii found our home wifi network with WPA security easily. I clicked around the shopping channel, but I’m in no rush to give Nintendo any more money today.

The girls and I had a kick out of making our Mii characters, and then using them in Wii Sports. By far, we like the Tennis game the best. I like the way the remote gives feedback and sound when you hit the ball. With only one numchuk, we haven’t tried the boxing game yet. Bowling got a little boring, but that’s because we’re all still pretty bad at it.

We got SpongeBob SquarePants: Creature from the Krusty Krab from GameFly. Eh. It’s going back tomorrow. Not worth keeping.

All in all, it’s a great first console game for our family. We’ll have fun with it.