Arcadia 2006
Posted by Skrud at Monday, November 13th 2006 at 2:02pm
I went to the 2nd ever Arcadia Festival on Saturday, hoping to try my hand at the Wii. I woke up (later than I wanted to), packed my Nintendo DS Lite and headed off to Stade Uniprix. When I got there I had to wait in line, outside, in the cold November rain. Finally I reached the indoors line-up, for the mandatory coat check. Once inside the festival proper, I headed straight for the Nintendo booth’s line up.
The largest concentration of people at Arcadia weren’t even in the Nintendo booth – they were in line for the Nintendo booth. Indeed, I didn’t even bother to stop anywhere else. The nice thing about a line-up of Nintendo enthusiasts is, of course, the fact that a lot of people were carrying Nintendo DS systems. We managed to bide our time playing a massive multiplayer game of MarioKart while waiting – for about 3 hours. Nintendo was kind enough to set up some of their DS Stations so that a console was facing the lineup, so people without DS’s could entertain themselves. There were also animators blowing horns and chucking t-shirts and belts into the line up, making sure everyone was properly hyped and enthused.
When I finally got inside the Nintendo booth, I lined up for Excite Truck, quickly gave up (4 minutes a race multiplied by 10 people in front me …) and went to line up for WarioWare: Smooth Moves, a series of micro-games about three seconds long, each completely wacky and each requiring a different way of holding the Wiimote. It was ridiculously fun, as you would expect from WarioWare (which blew me away at the previous Arcadia on GameCube).
The only other game I managed to play was Wii Sports. I played boxing (and accidentally punched my opponent in the head for real … ) and a 4-player game of tennis. It’s just as much fun as it looks. The controls are so simple and intuitive … You box just like you would expect, and you play tennis just like you would expect. It’s so … natural.
Was Arcadia worth the $10 ticket price, even though I spent about 5 hours in line and only 1 hour actually playing any games? Hell yes. I’m waking up uber-early / not going to bed in order to get a Wii next Sunday.
Wow, I’m really happy I didn’t go now. Those lines are insane.
Ah, it was so worth it. Again, if you brought something to keep you busy it wasn’t so bad. Thien, on the other hand, came with nothing, so he gave up on the Nintendo line.
See, the DS Lite was invented to support fans. Fans who need to wait in five hour lineups! BRILLIANT MARKETING!