An insider's outside perspective on the Wii U launch

For all the action up in this mother, my personal experience surrounding the surprisingly impetuous launch of the Wii U has been notably atypical. Despite having written a confirmed shitload (I googled for "shitload thesaurus" in an effort to spice this line up with no success) of articles Entirely Spanning the month of October—or as I like to call it, Brantober—the last three N-Sider.com posts have exploded forth from the fingers and mouths of Cory and Amber. I love it when people who are not me talk about things, they always know what they're doing. But I also hate it when I don't write. I gotta do it, it makes me feel all good in me. But it's important I mean, in a good way, for me to have had a bit of a break, to sit back and watch their impressions and their thoughts about this Nintendo Wu, a thing I am probably too close to mentally despite ironically having never actually seen or played with one in person.


And for that matter, how about the thoughts of the horrendous Internet, this ghastly FuckMachine! Heaven help the souls that turn loose upon it their creations, to be judged in all regards; heaven help their works doubly. Have you seen the shit that people have been saying about the Wii U? I heard the update was five gigs, no it's one gig, this is a deal breaker, pre-order cancelled. Mother... mother of god, do the children know about the bandwidth of this Got Damm random access memory? If they could only know, these pitiable creatures. Would they still love Mario? My Facebook wall tells a different story than these rapists of reason do, one of friends who are playing games on their new Wii Us instead of scouring the asshole of the world for a crumb of shit upon which they might hoist their breathtaking assessments re: how stinky it is.

I want to tell them they are wrong, but I am conveniently banned from a popular Inter Tube message web post site for three weeks because I said the word "matoor," which is probably the least offensive thing I have ever done or will ever do in my blood-chilling life to come.

It has given me a nice vantage point though, all of this garbage. I have no Wii U, yet, even though I technically own one—it is on the way to me from an undisclosed location in Middle America. I am forced to rely on the impressions of others to gain an understanding of what exactly it's all about. I have an outlet with which to share my thoughts to my reader, only for the last week it's been already busy with the words of my cohorts. And I have an account on a message board with which I could parade into battle, suffering the slings and arrow of outrageous banality—only I am prohibited from using it at the moment. What does a man do who wants to come to terms with an amorphous enigma, a hardware and software platform that is understandable but not understandable as it exists, divorced from my grasp?

One way for me to frame it is that I want to believe what I want to believe. I wanna know that Nintendo is Nintendo, and it doesn't matter what anyone says because I just know that this thing is going to be magical like Nintendo stuff is. Another way is for me to approach it pessimistically, knowing that any actual joy will be massively greater when offsetting my internal constant agony. Yet a third way is to run the path of a happy middle ground, understanding the bad and remaining optimistic about the good.


Ironically, none of the three options actually work for me, because what I have been doing is instead viewing the world of the Wii U, this impossible concept, through a series of disparate filters, none of which conform to any specific ideal. Each of my friends are psychotic in their own ways, and their little social network posts, their articles, their comments, allow me new and twisted insights into their black souls. To some, Nintendo Land is glorious manna. To others it is a cellophane wrapper inside which a hot burrito once sat: echoing the existence of something great, past or future, but unsatisfying, as a wrapper tends to be. To yet others, a contingent of the outside, we have plain ignorance. Is a Wii U something you use on the kitchen table? Does it perform rap songs?

QUESTION: How does one, when only viewing reality through a series of various lenses, actually come to terms with, or gain an understanding of, the world around them?

Maybe that is the real meat of the thing here, the reason that so many Internet people oscillate between hard criticism and unfettered praise, searching for something to latch onto: we want to find something we believe is true, whether it is or not. We want to look and look, and when we find that piece, we want to believe we believe, for whatever purpose that piece fits our own agenda, fits what we think we know.


In a few days a box containing a box containing a Wii U video game console will arrive on my doorstep. Despite having heard everything and nothing from nobody and everybody, I suspect that once I open it up my own opinions will erase those of others. For me, and for anyone else who yet awaits their own New Nintendo Toy, it will be a fresh and exciting feeling, not unlike the first time you watched a movie you couldn't find the good in at all, and then discovered it had a 96% sweet rating on the Internet, or read a book that was clearly a masterpiece, yet happened to be despised by society at large, all of these numbers delivered by people quite different from yourself, because how could anyone be the same?