November flew by

It finally happened: I nearly missed an entire month. There will be no were almost no posts for November of 2006 in my blog. Over four years, I’ve been running this thing, and never once went a full calendar month without a post. I have some memes that I posted on LiveJournal — maybe I’ll port some of those over here just for something to fill into November, although that’d bring me some guilt. I blame sloth, mainly. I do have one post that I only put on LiveJournal for some reason, which I’ve now brought over here. I don’t feel so guilty about doing that, since it’s not just a meme or whatever random junk I normally post on LJ. It’s all about Guitar Hero II and my progress at the time.

So, as partially mentioned in what is now my prior post, two very big gaming events happened in November that wound up consuming a lot of my free time:

• Guitar Hero II: Released November 7th for the PS2.
• Nintendo Wii: Released November 19th.

Within a few days of Guitar Hero II’s release, I’d already beaten all but one of the songs. I’m still stuck on Free Bird on Expert. People say it’s easy, but I can’t do the ripples well and fail at 74-76% consistently.

As for the Wii, I actually did the camping out thing. I went to two Wal-Mart stores and called three others at around 9:30pm on Saturday, November 18th. Every single one had full lines already. I wound up swinging by Target, just to see how it was going there, and I was informed that if I were to step in the line, I’d be number 27 of 33. I called Lisa with a nervous tone in my voice and said “They’ve only got like six left”. Being the wonderful wife that she is, she asked what she could bring to me.

At around 10:30pm, Lisa rolled up with a couple of blankets and folding chairs and a pillow, as well as some extra clothing. She stayed for a little while, but she also had work on Sunday, so she left after probably a half hour or so.

The next several hours were spent with absolute strangers, save for one guy who I knew through a friend of a friend, so basically, complete strangers. I realize now that I didn’t even get anyone’s names, although I do recall one person’s WoW character and realm, so, I might be able to get in contact with them again if I really wanted to do so. I’ve already tried to run into them online, with no luck. The people were genuinely friendly and kind, and very amusing. This comic from xkcd.com summarizes the situation well:

Over the duration of the night, some stragglers came in, and the last person who wound up getting a Wii arrived at around 4:30am. We told him he wasn’t guaranteed, but he waited it out, and I bet he’s glad he did, because it wound up that a couple of people skipped out on the line and he wouldn’t have gotten one otherwise.

At 7am, they came out and handed out tickets, which guaranteed our console. The store wouldn’t open until 8am, so I went down the street to McDonald’s for a quick restroom stop and some warm food. I went back and got back into my pre-determined spot in line and waited it out. I was home by around 8:45am, Wii in hand.

Since I do the game review thing at Digital Entertainment News, I’ve managed to score a number of free games, not to mention a lot of store credit, so I’ve already got quite the library of games going:

• Wii Sports (with console, but still worth listing, lots of fun)
• The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
• Excite Truck
• Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz
• Madden 2007
• Tony Hawk’s Downhill Jam
• Marvel: Ultimate Alliance
• Red Steel

I’ve also picked up a few games for the Virtual Console. SimCity brings me more joy than I’d have imagined. Ah, memories.

So, basically I just had a crazy busy gaming month. I feel bad that I’ve now got a big giant hole in my archives, but, at least I won’t be missing out on December now. I’ll try to get back to my summer trips series of posts before it’s actually summer next year.