I’m embarrassed to admit that, barring shenanigans, I’ll be jointly acquiring a Nintendo Wii this evening from a filthy Craigslist scalper. Why pay this parasitic premium? Because it’s not worth my time to stand out in the cold every Saturday morning from now until Christmas, hoping I’ll beat a vicious pack of under-caffeinated soccer moms to the counter of my local game store.
Buying from a scalper was easy. I put my offered amount on Craigslist, went about my business, and later that day I had someone willing to meet me at my neighborhood Metro station, brand new Wii in hand. I thought online retail was supposed to deliver that ease and speed of purchase. Amazon pissed off me and everyone else who wanted a Wii by creating the online equivalent of those 5AM game store queues. JC Penny has been utterly uncommunicative as to whether or not the improbable quantity of orders they took will be fulfilled in a timely fashion. The only online retailers who’ve made it easy to order are selling outrageously priced bundles.
Console supply-and-demand grouching aside, Nintendo made a very puzzling decision with regard to the Wii’s video output options. After doing a fair bit of research I can say with reasonable confidence that there’s no way, at present, to get a Wii talking to a 30” Apple Cinema Display.
For that matter, there’s no affordable way to get a Wii displaying on most any VGA or DVI display as best I can tell. What about all the college students getting a Wii for the holidays who only have a computer display in their dorm rooms? The lack of a VGA/DVI adaptor seems a bizarre gap in Nintendo’s launch-time accessory lineup.
Once again, Craigslist to the rescue. It’s actually way, way cheaper to buy a used television than to attempt to piece together the right combination of adapters, convertors, and scalers to get a good picture from the Wii on a computer monitor.
It’s a big, strange market out there. If I were a third-party accessory manufacturer I’d be licking my chops right about now.
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