I can be your (Guitar) Hero, baby

So I finally played Nintendo Wii for the first time on Friday night, and now I'm completely obsessed with the idea of getting a console. The scene was my friends L&I's house (they're married). They got their Wii only about a month ago, and were already pretty enamored with it, so part of the tease of the dinner invite was the promise of some Wii action afterwards. It was kinda late by the time we finally got around to firing it up -- 11:30 -- but they were game to let my friend Lara and me give it a try. First up was Wii tennis. So great! Especially since I play in real life. Though, I lost all of the four or so games I played, two of which were against Lara (who also plays tennis). Then we played some other random games.. one where you're on a cow knocking down stuff on a raceway, a shooting game (which I won vs. Lara -- handily) and laser air hockey. But then....we busted out Guitar Hero. Now that was SO much fun. I played two songs on the Easy level (which has you using three of the six [?] keys), and I hit 96% of the notes on the second one! Yeah, it's only three keys, but I still felt a great sense of accomplishment. I also loved the parts when I got to rock out and pull the neck of the guitar up. Ha, and my sense of accomplishment was increased when Lara tried a couple songs and got booed off the stage within about 20 seconds!! (Sorry Lara, but it was only right after my having lost at many other games earlier that night ;o)). I think what I love about the Wii is that it's so simple and easy -- you don't have to worry about what eight buttons mean, or remember how many bullets or grenades you have left, or keep track of some intricate backstory. It's just unadulterated, straightforward fun.

Anyway, I was at Costco this afternoon with my mom and talked up one of the employees about the Wii. Apparently they sell out of the consoles amazingly fast after stock up (they were of course out today). If I were to get one, though, I'd almost certainly get it there, just because of the great warranty and return policy, and apparently, according to the dude, for the ~$300 you plonk down, you get two controllers instead of one, and an extra game or two. Unfortunately, Guitar Hero isn't one of those games; L&I said it was about $100 for the GH game and guitar thing. Ouch! So we'll see. At the very least, I'm hoping I'll be getting more frequent dinner invites from L&I so I can periodically get a Wii fix!

I should mention also that for the tail end of last week, up until my Wii-velation, my obsession was the idea of getting an iPod Touch, mainly because a co-worker brought in his iPhone to show Eric and me and we were just enthralled. But then we did the math on how much more a month we'd be shelling for our cell-phone plan, and we just couldn't justify it. I mentioned that my dad has an iPod Touch that has a lot of the features that the iPhone has, it just needs free WiFi to use them. So we were all fired up about getting one of those. Problem is, they're mucho expensive -- even at Costco, around $389 for the 16G, and $489 for the 32G.

Though.. my iPod Touch obsession was revived a bit this evening when I was at my parents' for dinner and my dad gave me a little tour of his iPod Touch. It's super slick! So now I have to let my obsessions simmer and we'll see if and when I end up buying one of the two. Hm...maybe I'll buy one now, and the other when bonus time rolls around at work in early September...