The happiness of getting a Wii

Although I was willing to pay more than the retail price for a new Wii from a private seller, it was still hard to find. The retail price plus taxes comes up to $320, so given the rarity of the console, you have to be willing to do one of two things: 1- be patient and shop around (in person, not by phone) and be at the right place at the right time, or 2- pay more to get it now.

The people that were selling it at a lower price, that's between $350 and $375 (lower than that I found was fishy, because why would you be selling it lower, when you can very easily sell it at a higher price?), were selling it very quickly. I had no chance there. But then we looked on e-Bay, for someone living close enough so that I could drive there to pick it up, given that the seller would not mind that (because sometimes they do mind). So we did find one, but it was a package comprised of the following:

• Wii hardware, sensor bar, cables and controllers (2 remotes and 2 nunchuks) with original packaging and manuals.
  
  
• Wii Sports (Tennis, Bowling, Golf, Baseball and Boxing)
  
  
• 4 additional Wii titles: The Legend of Zelda (Twilight Princess), Excite Truck, Dragonball Z Budokai Tenkaichi 2, and World Series of Poker 2007.
  
  
• 4 Wii 'Virtual Console' titles: Super Mario Bros, The Legend of Zelda, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Super Mario 64.
  
  
• 4 Gamecube titles: Spyro (Enter the Dragonfly BNIB), Zelda Four Swords, Zelda the WindWaker, Sonic Mega Collection.
  
  
• 1 Gamecube controller and Memory Card.

This came up to a whooping $600, but it was actually a very good deal since the seller invested over $800 for all of this. And also, there are going to be a few things we are going to sell from it, plus our old GameCube. And most of all, since we paid with PayPal, we were covered for the entire amount in case the seller was not honest. He was honest though, but it was all worth it.

And most of all, we are having a blast with it :-D

The trouble of getting a Wii

Now that we have decided to get our kids a Wii Nintendo game console, we can't find any, anywhere. Why is this so hard to find? I mean, why is Nintendo making so few of these? As far as I know, they don't have production problems, like Sony had with they Blue-Ray lasers for their PS3. So what's going on? Are they selling so many of these that even if they ship thousands per week, it's still not enough? Well, maybe it is the case. And I haven't been reading every piece of news about the Wii that's out there, so there probably is much more to this. I just hope it's not a marketing "tactic" to create some frenzy about getting the console, and that they have tons of them just waiting in a warehouse somewhere...

The kids have been nice, they have been patient, and now it just breaks my heart not being able to make them a surprise. I would have liked to offer them the Wii in time for the March break, but that did not happen. And on top of that, CRA (the Canada Revenue Agency) is having system problems, and there will be delays for processing the tax returns, so I will not be getting my return as soon as expected. Although I can probably find the credit to buy the Wii, but it still sucks...