Lucky Friday

October 15, 2006

This sure was a Friday the 13th to remember, at least for me. It was Wii pre-order day, which I am so thankful occurred after PS3 pre-order day. The stakes have officially been raised, folks. Just getting a preorder for one of these machines means waiting in line. Then you'll wait in line for the machine itself. Then for the big releases on that machine (i.e. Halo 3). I never would have guessed it'd come to this, despite the paltry 400,000 units Sony has allocated for the US. But if this is the way it's gonna be, I'll step up. Um... biyatch.

Before I went to bed on Thursday I tried issuing a command to my body to wake up on time. The sort of thing where you stand in the living room and say to yourself, very firmly, "I will wake up at six o'clock tomorrow. It is vitally important that I am up and out of the house by 8 AM to get to the Governor's Square Mall." Amazingly, it worked! I arrived at the mall at 8:10, waving to the mall walkers as they stride by me. There were a few people at the Gamestop location, so I turn the corner to EB Games. I found myself fourth in line behind a couple with their young child who came here at 6:30 AM (and were thus first in line).

The guy who arrived just after me came from the Ocala street EB Games location. Apparently, college students had started lining up since midnight; he arrived at 7:30 AM and was #32 in line... and they only expected to get 30 Wiis. But here at Governor's Square he was #5. Good for him. It turns out our store only expected 14 consoles. When the store opened at 10:00 AM there was a full 30 people in line, all of them having heard about the shortage. Why were they still in line, I wondered? Did they expect a dozen people in front of them to just drop dead? Hope is a curious human delusion.

Of course, even with my Wii preorder in hand and a gentle day at work, I expected the worst on Friday. Everybody's least favorite anti-gaming lawyer, Jack Thompson, was expecting a ruling on Rockstar's Bully game that day. He had gone to a judge in Miami to have the game declared as a public nuisance. Never mind that Florida's Public Nuisance law is designed to ward off strip clubs and porno shops, I still expected the judge to try and ban the sale of the game (and for Rockstar to win on appeal). But no, the judge actually said the game wasn't a nuisance! I couldn't believe it. Common sense had prevailed, and I was ecstatic the whole night.

I paid for it the next day. I didn't get enough sleep on Friday and ended up zonking out at 7 PM on Saturday. I woke up at midnight still in my clothes and with a stuffy nose. So I took some NyQuil to try and get back to sleep, when the fire alarm starts chirping for batteries at 1 AM. Great. Thank god Wal-Mart is open 24 hours; I drove there, picked up two 9-volts, then drove back and installed one. And found that the chirping didn't stop. There was another fire alarm who needed its battery replaced. Thank goodness that I bought a double pack.

But in the end I got a full nine hours of sleep and woke up feeling really good today. The best part was probably when I realized I had something interesting to blog about. Otherwise I'd just have to stop in midsente