Wii need cables, and lots of 'em!

Last week Nintendo launched its new gaming console, the Wii. And Nintendo played a much smarter game than Sony did with its PlayStation 3, 'cuz what money that Sony would otherwise have plowed into their fiasco of a marketing campaign, Nintendo has used in production. There may now be about a million or so Wiis on the shelves here in the states by the end of the year: if you direly want one enough, you should be able to get one (and this is one gaming system right out the gate that I would love to have!).

But alas! All is NOT well at this hour with the Wii. It seems that Nintendo vastly underestimated the demand for the component cables that are used to hook up the Wii to a high-definition TV set. What Wii component cables are out there are now going for around $150 and even more on eBay. Last week, on the day that Lisa and I bought our first HDTV, I ran out to the local Wal-Mart to get a component cable to hook up our DVD player to the set. I also tried it with the standard A/V cable and there is a HUGE improvement when using the component (which is very much like a standard RCA plug but its used to deliver separate channels for red, blue and green for output, sorta like a 3-CCD camcorder). Since the Wii doesn't have any dedicated HDTV capability, the Wii's component cable has become a must-have thing for a lot of Wii owners (if you want to see what Wii graphics look like with component cable versus standard AV look here and do the mouse-over on the graphic). A third-party component cable industry is starting to rise to fill the need, and for those Wii owners who are feeling particularly daring instructions have started appearing online on how to create your own Wii component cable.

The reason I'm posting about this is that I find it rather fascinating. I've never seen people go so crazy about new video game systems before... and now they've gone ape over a relatively inexpensive cable, of all things. I remember when the big craze was over Super Mario Bros. 3 and the original Mortal Kombat and then the Nintendo 64 (even though I never owned one) but what we've seen going on this past week or so between the PlayStation 3 and the Wii dwarfs them all.

And I have to wonder: as sophisticated as video game systems have become, with their realistic graphics and depictions of real-world situations and physics, what's going to be the next big video game fad? How much more "real" than real can a video game get? And will we always be this mad to get on the bandwagon for the latest system?

Lord only knows. But I'm going to be VERY interested to see what kind of video games there are when my children start playing them some years from now. I just hope that I haven't lost my gaming skillz by then :-)