I went to some place with a ridiculous name in my college town a while after that to play one of them, you could pay like by the hour to use their stuff and it was my first time seeing a High-Definition Graphics display and I watched the Dead or Alive women cascade around like gelatinous orbs loosely connected with elastic sinew. It seemed weirdly futurey, but too soon, like we had thought. But I remember thinkin' it was really neat how there was all this other "stuff" to do that wasn't just playing a game, all these achievement menus and your profile and this stuff. Then of course the PS3 and the Wii came out a year later, and the run-up of anticipation for the Wii was just goddamned awful.
By this time, a month ahead, I was frothing at the mouth as though transformed into a diseased rat, hot juice dribbling out the corner of my mouth like a soggy Hostess custard pie. I waited with my girlfriend in line in a Wal-Mart greenhouse for twelve hours and we played Clubhouse Games locally with some other supernerds on the DS. By the time we got the cameras out we were delirious stinking messes hoggin' down on cheap snacks bought from the food aisles, ripped into savagely, humanity at its worst. I have a picture of me from there where I'm sitting in a lawn chair or something and the hood of my sweatshirt is tucked behind my ears like a real dink, and I am just trapped in cascades of joy, unable to control my physical condition. I have erased it from all my hard drives and backups forever. That was pretty cool though getting that thing home and my roommates were all sitting around drinking or whatever and I was like look at this shit, hot off the assembly line, we are gonna play some fuckin' bowling. There was so much crap to play with out of the box on that Wii that I stayed up all night dipping around with it.
Maybe it's just cause I'm getting older or cause I have more things that are important in my life now or something but I feel like I am not quite as memorably jazzed about the Wu coming out, I mean I am don't get me wrong. It seems like there is still so much to see, so much firmware we haven't been told about, so much interface to dig through and the Miiverse, and how all that will work, lots to be excited about! And only a month away we know almost nothing. I'm not trying to complain that I'm not excited, I am! I am just sayin' hey, it's only a month now! I realized that maybe my issue isn't that I am not jazzed, just that over the years I have forgotten how to really GET HYPE IN MY FACE. So hey how about this. What is the first thing you are going to do when you hook it up, after you go through the setup and all that to make it nice and juicy on your set? Tell me, so I can get hot.
I think for me it'll maybe be probably the store, I really want to see what that store interface is like. I wonder if like some people are saying we'll have a few GameCube games up there on the first day? Wouldn't that be something. I am also really curious to see how the Mii thing works. Hey, do you suppose there will be some way for us to transfer our Mii from the 3BM to the Wu, or do you think we'll have to build him or her up all from scratch again? Man, that would be kind of bogus but also maybe okay, it's kind of a break-'er-in tradition when it comes to the new Nintendo systems these days huh.
There's gonna be so much to just "play with" on the system itself really. We'll all have to run as far away from our sets as possible to see when the Gamepad starts to flake out and lose connection. We're gonna have to set up our Miiverse profiles and everything, and maybe arrange our icons on the home screen. We can check out the browser for sure. We'll also probably have to give "Wii mode" a try and pop in an old game to see how that all works. Video calls tormenting our fellow proud new owners? Check! Personally, I plan on floppin' my dick onto the base unit just as a kind of ritual, like I do with every new gadget or piece of furniture I buy, or food after a trip to the grocery store, just to say it's mine, kinda stake a claim, mark the territory.
Mine is gonna get mailed from America to my house here in Japan by my dad, who doesn't know yet that I will be forcing him to do it as soon as it arrives at great personal inconvenience. It's gonna cost me like eighty stupid dollars to get it priority global international whatever express banged out across the lake in a tin can and hucked to my door. In that week after it's out in the states but before I get it, I am gonna have a real yen for it Ah ha ha I was forced to say that at gunpoint ha ha. That week is gonna be hard really hard! But I'll still have it two weeks before the Japanese release, which is going to make me so popular among the 14,000 Japanese friends, most of them girls from animation, that I have invited over for my own personal launch party.
I remember when I was coming home in the car with my GameCube, my first midnight launch-moment system. I was only just turned 18 at the time and had bunged my mom into driving me up to the city to get it. In the car I opened it all up, passed the controller around so that my sister could try it out. I remember trying to insist that my mother hold it, and feel the extra click on the shoulder buttons and she so totally did not care cause it was like one in the goddamned morning. I got it home and played Rogue Squadron for like three hours straight, checked the memory card menu, and that was it. Kinda neat how eleven years later you don't even need to buy a game with it to have tons to do on it. In a way these system launches kinda trigger something in us I think, a return to that goofy childish mindset of excitement, even if our adult brains have taught us to temper those feelings. One month away might have felt like an eternity before, but a month moves by much more quickly now. I guess the good part about that is it means the Wu is even closer than I thought!!!!!!
What are you gonna do the first thing you open it up out the box huh?