No Wii For Me
I haven’t been a big video gamer the last few years, mainly because today’s games seem to take too much time to learn, and I don’t have the patience to learn all the secrets of a complex imaginary world. The real world is complex enough. I like small, simple games geared more toward the casual player, not the gaming junkie. SimCity and Civilization are my personal exceptions to this rule, and many times I’ve started to play Civilization at 11PM, “for only for an hour” only to realize it’s suddenly 3 in the morning.
The new Nintendo Wii looks different, and some of the games seem oriented more toward players like me. So I decided to buy one yesterday, and did something that I thought was rather clever. I set up a script to scrape Amazon’s order page, and text message my cell phone the minute the product became available to order. The text message arrived on schedule at around 11 Sunday morning, and I raced to the computer to hit the 1-click order button. Amazingly, all 100,000 consoles Amazon supposedly had were sold in the 30 seconds between the moment I got my SMS and the second I tried to place the order. Apparently this idea wasn’t clever enough. At least I wasn’t sitting up all night hitting ‘reload’ or waiting outside outside all night.
