Another day, another attempt at finding a Wii. No luck though. I was there at GameStop when the doors opened but there was no shipment today. Oh well. This isn’t looking like it is going to be a very fruitful venture. This is the third time that I have checked this week. Dominica has done some checking too. But nothing. At least there has been some hope that shipments are still happening just not as many as are needed.
While I was at GameStop, though, I did pick up some needed supplies like the Classic Controller for the Wii which allows us to play games that are downloaded via the Wii’s Virtual Console (you can store them onto an SD memory card.) The games are normally re-releases of NES, SNES, Nintendo 64, Sega Genesis / MegaDrive, Neo Geo or TurboGrafx 16 games. I think that they need to figure out how to emulate the Sega Saturn. That would probably have a few games (Panzer Dragoon, anyone?) that people would really be willing to shell out for. Perhaps the games are too large or the Wii doesn’t have the power to emulate the Saturn. I also think that they should get it to emulate the Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance systems. Those games are small and I bet that there are many people who would be happy to be able to play some of their favourite games on the big screen for a change. My plan is to get Paper Mario for the Nintendo 64 via the Virtual Console to try out the system. This is a handy list of all games available for the virtual console.
I also picked up a third party wireless GameCube controller to use with the Wii. The biggest draw, for me, in getting the Wii is that it is able to play Nintendo GameCube games. Since I never owned a GameCube I am now able to go and get all of the old GC games used very inexpensively and have a nice collection of just the best games after all of the wheat has been separated from the chaff after years of people playing these games. So in addition to the wireless controller I picked up three games for the system that Dominica will be very happy with: Super Mario Sunshine, The Legend of Zelda: The Four Swords Adventure and The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. She pretty much has the definitive Zelda collection sans the old Game Boy titles in the series. We own the GBA remakes of the original three titles (Z1 and Z2 from the NES and Z3 from the SNES), all of the N64 titles (the collector’s editions even), all of the GBA original titles, all of the GC titles (as of today) and the one Wii title. There is one new game for the DS that is just now out that she does not have yet.
Dominica and I made some Christmas plans today. The plan is that we are going to leave New Jersey on December 21st, that is Friday, after work and drive up to Frankfort and spend the night at Dominica’s parents’ house. In the morning they will take Oreo by car and drive with him to Houston, Texas. Hopefully that long of a trip with Dexter panicking will not teach Oreo to worry about car travel. Then Min and I will go to my dad’s house that Saturday morning and stay there until Christmas morning.
At six in the morning on Christmas day Dominica and I are flying out of Rochester to go to Houston to meet everyone there for Christmas. I will be working both from “home” and from the Houston office while we are down there. It will give me a chance to scope out the Houston facility. We will be in Houston all week and will come back the weekend after Christmas. Dominica will ride back with her parents and Oreo and I will most likely fly back to Newark but might ride back with them as well. While in Houston I will be working from Williams Tower – the fourth tallest building in the state of Texas and the fourth tallest in Houston and the tallest outside of downtown (Williams Tower is in the heart of uptown.)
I ordered my textbook for my class from Amazon today. It turns out that one of my two remaining textbooks for my class is available online through the university so I only need to buy one of the four since I already own the other two (and have read them both in the bast nine months.) I overnighted the textbook so that I can work on my homework this weekend easily. I can’t be falling behind or I will never catch up again.
My day was pretty busy today. Lot’s of work rolling in all day long. I can never decide if I should be coming into the office to “be in the office” or staying home to actually get work done.
Tomorrow, after work, we are planning on having a Dungeons & Dragons game at our apartment but, at the moment, we have no managed to secure a dungeon master yet nor do Dominica and I even have so much as dice to play with so we are in pretty rough shape. We are waiting to see how this plays out. Tomorrow night is rather up in the air at the moment.
The chair that Dominica ordered from Target had a matching love seat that is currently on sale so we needed to make a decision about it before we got the chair. We decided to just bite the bullet and get the loveseat too. So now we are going to be going from a rather spartan living room to a rather cozy one with a lot of seating locations. But no television to watch yet so just a lot of seating. Hopefully we can address that after Christmas spending is over or when the year end budget is a little more clear. Getting the chair and loveseat didn’t help things any.
After work Dominica took Oreo to the vet for his regular checkup. So far he is looking to be pretty healthy. They love him at the vet. He is everyone’s favourite little boy.
I got back to Newark around seven and walked over to GameStop on my way home (it isn’t really on the way home) and found out that Wiis had come in this morning just ten or fifteen minutes after I had left there! No Wii love for us I guess. I did pick up a memory card for the GameCube that I had forgotten about this morning and also got Skies of Arcadia Legends and Tales of Symphonia for the GameCube used.
I also walked over to the comic book shop on Broad in the hopes that they would carry game dice but neither do they appear to carry them nor were they open. It was a lot of walking for me this evening.
I got home and ordered in pizza from Nino’s for dinner. Dominica was home just minutes after me. She had done some shopping and had not found any dice either but had, finally, managed to find a ten foot long white grounded extension cord.
Dinner arrived and we hooked up the GameCube stuff and started playing Skies of Arcadia Legends. We have the original Skies of Arcadia for Dreamcast but this very has the wireless controller, no disk swapping and supposedly better graphics. We only got about thirty minutes into the game tonight though but so far it looks pretty good.
Ryan came over to test out some of his stereo equipment that he was having problems with. His “new” stereo from eBay is having issues and he wanted to see how ours was working to verify which piece of equipment is not functioning correctly.
After Ryan left we tried using the Wii Virtual Console and downloaded the Nintendo 64 version of Paper Mario. Neither of us ever player this game back when the N64 was our main systems (we each independently had the Nintendo 64 back in the day.) Dominica had never even heard of it. We fired it up and it played well. The graphics are very impressive for the N64. This must have been quite the game in its day. It was released in the United States in early 2001.
We were tired and were off to sleep a little earlier than usual.