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   I was going to begin this piece by wishing a late "Happy Birthday!" to Shigeru Miyamoto (who turned 54 last week on November 16), and by talking about how the Wii was originally intended to cost under $100 and stuff. But instead, I'm affraid that a more important message is in order: according to numerous reports received by IGN, there is a really nasty problem with some of the Wii consoles that ran the initial WiiConnect 24 update. And the problem is that, well, the update in question pretty much killed the affected Wiis!

   There are two common error codes shown by the console in this case: 110213 and 32002. So should you encounter any such problem, you can either get a replacement Wii from Nintendo, or you can send them the faulty unit and receive it back in good shape along with your saved data - which is a pretty lenghty process. You can get more info on this matter (and on several others, unfortunately it seems there's more of them) by visiting Nintendo's customer service website.

   And I'm affraid the bad news don't stop here. As you probably know by now, after the console's North American release, the Wii is still missing some of its most attractive online features: the Wii Opera browser, the Wii News Channel and the Wii Forecast Channel. Nintendo says that the Forecast Channel will be activated on December 20, the News Channel will start airing on January 27, and we may have to wait even longer for the Opera browser! More information about its availability should be revealed in the coming weeks, which doesn't sound too encouraging at all.

   Despite all these problems, it looks like the Wii is doing great when it comes to pure gaming. A few days ago I wrote about the console's launch line-up and upcoming Wii games, but only briefly mentioned some classic titles downloadable via the Virtual Console. Well, the VC has been up and running even the day before the launch, so now users can buy Wii Points and download some of their old favorites. And here is the pricing for each game from the classic formats:
- NES games cost 500 Wii Points ($5)
- Super NES and Sega Genesis games cost 800 Wii Points ($8)
- Nintendo 64 games cost 1,000 Wii Points ($10)
- TurboGrafx-16 games will cost at least 600 Wii Points ($6)    Judging by the stats from GameRankings, the Wii games are doing a lot better than the PS3 games so far. The absolute best is, predictably enough, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess - with an average score of 96.5% (as opposed to PS3's top title, Resistance: Fall of Man, which only managed to score an average of 88.9%). So despite my earlier hunch that the Wii launch line-up was looking diluted, it actually turns out that the PlayStation 3 "scored" the most appalling games at launch.

   In the end, neither Sony nor Nintendo can claim to have achieved a perfect launch. But despite my slight disappointment with the Wii's aforementioned problems, I'm still just as excited about getting one when it launches in Europe early next month. If all goes well for Nintendo from here on, they are hoping to sell 1 million Wii units in North America within the next two to three weeks, and another million by the second week of January. But even so, they are still expecting the console to sell out this Christmas, and supply issues are going to be inevitable in the first few weeks.

   However, it's not the console itself that's having a hard time meeting the demand, and it's not the extra Wii remotes either: it's the Nunchuks! Apparently, Nintedo expected people to buy more Wiimotes, and they under-estimated the demand for extra Nunchuk controllers - which are rather hard to find for sale these days, it seems.

   Or perhaps they had a good reason for supplying plenty more Wii remotes. Such as... domestic accidents, which are more likely to happen through the frantic use of a Wiimote. One such alleged accident involved a Wii Sports game of bowling, a pair of sweaty hands and a fragile Wiimote strap, and resulted in one cracked TV screen. Quite concerning! But while some brake their household items by mistake, others smash their Wii on purpose. Here, take a look for yourself. The horror... The horror...