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Once upon a time I had just moved to Japan and I was really psyched to fulfill one of my teenage dreams: to reserve and then purchase the brand newest Final Fantasy game on the day it came out and then do my best to play through it in Japanese. As it turns out, the Japanese wasn't the reason I never finished the game, because I couldn't do it in English either.

I am so full, I have no room for anything left in my bulging stomach. We made some spinach fettuccine, it is so good. I eat and eat it until there is only space in me for liquid. And yet, for some reason or another, I feel myself drawn to the cabinet, to that place where I keep my pouches of slug vomit and preserved dicks. I am bored, I still don't have a Wii U, what the hell am I going to do, get stickers in Paper Mario?

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.

It's hard to load up a page on the Internet today without finding people goin' ham about this or that Wii U problem. But I've said my piece about that. It's time to lighten the mood. It's new hardware day! That brief glow where you first notice all those fancy little touches, and start to integrate new systems and ideas into your routine. Let's focus on those details. There are a ton of things about my first day with the Wii U that made me smile.

Time sure flies when you're working overtime. It's nearly November 18th already. How did that happen? The launch of the Wii U is just a day away, and by early Sunday morning (or late Saturday night), Nintendo's next console will have landed on store shelves—and for everyone lucky enough to have snagged one—living rooms across the continent. But not mine. For the first time in three generations of Nintendo consoles (and unlike Cory and Brandon), I won't be picking up a Wii U at launch.

We're in the thick of it, bros and broettes. In the wind up to the Wii U's looming plop, people are gettin' tense. Each little glimpse we get of the various system features is accompanied by a cacophony of shrieks and wails, as if in our diabetic final throes we've found only saline in our syringes. It is time to CHILL OUT. I'll tell ya, I'm actually quite enthused about what I've seen from the Wii U so far, but others have been decidedly candid with their displeasure regarding Missing Feature A, or Flawed System B.

Whoa man, one more week until the Wu comes out "for people in America" oh ho ho not me. The information is really starting to seep out too. Just today there was a new Iwata Kas about the Wii U Chat application. And there was a FAQ that Nintendo posted on their Japanese website, lovingly put into English by a message board goer. I for one have just started to reach the point of System Information Saturation that renders me contented enough that I can actually started getting excited about the games, which is what we really should be excited about anyway and not the stupid firmware.

So we know the Wii U will feature a global achievement system called "accomplishments" when it launches in scant days. Oh, wait, we don't know that at all. This is one of the remaining Wii U mysteries—maybe there is a system there, or maybe there isn't. There have been hints, but there have also been plenty of things to suggest that maybe there is no such thing whatsoever, or that if there is, it's game-specific and not shared.

I suppose it's not necessary for me to summarize this morning's new Nintendo Direct presentation, which focused entirely on Wii U a mere week and a half in advance of its American release—plenty of other websites have that useless task covered. But I think I should at least call attention to a few of the neatest little bits that other places probably aren't going to talk too much about.

Certain places still do it to me, the right intersection between smoking area and kitchen and just enough noise to block out my brain. Maybe an underground train station shop where they're frying food on sticks and there's two tables and four seats at the bar, a tiny set playing a Tigers game. Or a roadside rest stop, just outside the smoking room, a burger place attached and a couple people.