Wholly Schmidt!

Last Friday I got my tax refund. My tax Wii-fund. I decided to buy a Wii. They’re hard to find, but within 48 hours of declaring my intent to actually purchase one, (I’d toyed with the idea since they launched, but never had the means and the inclination at the same time till now) I was victorious. Between Friday and Sunday I just made it a point to stop at any retailer (Wii-tailer!) in the vicinity of any errands I ran. Work Friday night, movies, other stores, church, etc. I hit Circuit Cities, Best Buys, EBs, Targets, and Wal*Marts every time I passed one; I even ventured into a K-Mart! Success came when I went slightly out of my way on a whim Sunday night after the Super Bowl and lucked out at Wal*Mart. There were none on the shelves, and at the local Wal*Mart that would’ve been the end of my trip. This was the “nice” Wal*Mart though, where you have at least a 50-50 chance of an employee actually checking for you if you ask about something. As I passed the empty shelf I caught an employee walking past the aisle, and even being in the nice Wal*Mart I gave him an easy out.

“Don’t have any Wiis, do you?” I asked.

“Yeah, I think we’ve still got one.”

“What, really?”

“Yeah, we had one in earlier, it’s over this way.”

Another employee chimes in as we walk over to another locked cabinet, “Yeah, but it’s a return.”

Whoa, now we’ve got a dilemma! Do I really want to buy expensive merchandise that’s been returned to the retailer with America’s most lax return policy?

Turns out I did! I rationalized that the same return policy would work just as well for me if there was anything wrong, and there wasn’t! Opening the box once I made it to the parking lot I saw that everything was physically present, and actually still individually wrapped in that annoying way electronics get packaged. I did some double checking online to make sure there wasn’t anything I should worry about, made sure there was nothing missing I overlooked, and then fired it up.

The system had obviously never been set up or used in any way before, so my working theory is that someone probably picked one up to eBay it, opened it up to take some pictures or something, but didn’t get the bids they wanted and returned it instead. I don’t know why else you would buy and then return a Wii without even trying it.

So, with my tax Wii-fund I got a Pwii-owned Wii last Wiikend! Now for the pictures. You can create little personalized avatars called “Miis” that you’ve probably already seen all over the internet. You can trade them with other Wii owners, parade them around the screen, and some games (like the included Wii Sports) will let you use them as your player in the game. So here’s the part where I post my creations as badly taken photographs of a television screen, low resolution, slightly unfocused, poorly cropped and not at all color corrected. Enjoy!

Me

No explanation needed, that’s my Mii.

Dad

It’s my dad!

Mom

It’s my mom!

V

From the movie/comic V for Vendetta.

Jack White

50% of The White Stripes

Gregory House

Kind of a stretch, but this is Dr. House from the show on Fox.

Dr. Zoidberg

From the cartoon Futurama, this is the least “technically correct” of my creations because there’s no way you could really create Zoidberg’s face with a Mii, but I feel like it captured is essence surprisingly well. I believe it’s the eyes.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 6th, 2007 at 7:51 am and is filed under Blog, Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.