There’s no question that the Wii is one of the most popular gift items this holiday season, and it’s no surprise that Nintendo’s supply simply can’t meet the demand. (OK, maybe a little … I still can’t quite wrap my head around it.) When Nintendo partnered with GameStop to announce the Wii ‘Rain Check’ program (a one-day reserve program that would guarantee a console some time January), it wasn’t hard to imagine the resulting lines of parents shoving one another to the ground. 

But according to a few GameStop store managers we spoke with, the program wasn’t quite as successful as they had anticipated. One store manager we spoke with thought he would stripped of his 18 available rain checks within minutes, but was still sitting on nine of them the following day. As a result, we were told the rain check program was extended beyond the initial December 21 "one day only" period. 

While some stores were able to sell through all of their rain checks (which required a fully refundable payment of $249.99), there were many who simply couldn’t, despite promotional signage and phone calls.

"People have been calling about the Wii for months," said one employee who wishes to remain anonymous, "so it’s shocking we still have rain checks left. Most people said they needed the system for Christmas, and were sure they’d be able to find one elsewhere, even though it’s only a few days away. Good luck with that."

Despite the lack of success some stores may have had with the rain check program, there’s no doubt about it, the demand for the Wii is still there … Santa just needs it now. For those of you who are willing to wait, check your local GameStop or EB Games and let us know if you have any success securing an empty box and a product voucher. 

[Photo: Picasa Web Album via GoNintendo]

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The DOJO week started off Co-op Events. Basically, there are new Event modes that two people can play together.  Event modes are themed stages where you have to do various tasks within certain rules such as defeating the most enemies in ten seconds. Tuesday brought a double update starting off with Porky’s theme from Mother 3. The second update was the stage called Frigate Orpheon from Metroid Prime. The stage will flip 180 degrees at random similar to Kraid’s stage from Melee.

Wednesday’s update revealed the item called Team Healer. Team Healer is an item one person can pick up and throw at your teammate to heal them. The higher the damage, the more your teammate will recover. There is a chance you might hit your opponent though and heal them on accident. Thursday’s update showed off Kirby’s special moves. He can swallow opponents and steal their powers. There’s a bunch of screens of Kirby with different powers ups and looks.  Today’s update brings a new movie called Subspace Emissary. It’s more of a teaser to show off the Subspace Emissary Adventure mode recycling some old footage and mixing in some new footage too. Check it out above.

So what did you all think of the Dojo week? I particularly love Kirby’s Snake form. It’s exactly how I imagined it.

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Before I head home for the holidays to live it up with some heavily spiked eggnog (and foolin’ around with old flames under the mistletoe) I thought I’d wish every gamer out there a happy holiday farewell.

2007 has been such a grand year that I wonder how 2008 can top it. I’m talking about the kind of thing that would actually bring together all the fanboys from each console camp, convince them all to lay down their weapons, and hold hands to sing "Hands Across America." Or since it’s the holidays, maybe "Don’t They Know It’s Christmas." Man, I would kill to see Bono, George Michael, Sting, and Boy George perform together again. I wonder why George and George never hooked up …

Anyways, believe it or not, what I have in this surprise gift above is even better. Hit the jump to tear off the wrapping to unveil this special holiday delight.

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Music4Games continues their list of stellar interviews with the people behind great game music with this new interview with the composers of NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams.

They talk with Tomoko Sasaki and Naofumi Hataya about the Wii title’s musical score, and touch on how the quality of it has been upgraded from the original NiGHTS title for the Sega Saturn. Luckily, you don’t have to take their word on it, as Music4Games has a couple of samples from the score availble within the interview.

Composer Hataya gives a message to fans of the NiGHTS series:

"To the fans of the previous series, thank you for waiting for such a long time. During the composition, I have been playing the game objectively as a representative of the NiGHTS-loving fans. This is a great game I can truly recommend regardless of whether you’re familiar with the previous version or not."

Head over to Music4Games to read the full interview. 

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Filed under: Microsoft Xbox 360

Many of you might have noticed a bevy of problems facing Xbox live over this past week: An unresponsive marketplace, the inability to recover a gamertag (or even sign in), and aggravating matchmaking wait times, to name a few. Major Nelson issued a statement last night explaining that while there have been no complete outages of the service over the past week, “problems like this are not acceptable,” and that they are working to get the service back to normal. Sadly, no time frame was provided on when repairs to the service would be complete.

There’s been no official statement on why the service has been so shoddy lately, but if we were the guessing type, we blame it on the holiday season. We’re sure that tons of people found a 360 under their trees (or candles), and immediately tried to hop online; only to collide with the millions of vacationing gamers who were already playing. Technology has come a long way, but the internet can still only hold so many racial epithet-slinging Master Chiefs before things start breaking down.

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Filed under: Hacks, Microsoft Xbox 360, First Person Shooters

Skyllus vBi, member of the professional gaming group Team vBi, just can’t seem to catch a break. After being recognized by Bungie for making a very popular Halo 3 video, Skyllus was rewarded with the incredibly rare in-game “Recon Armor“, which only Bungie employees and a select few Halo community members have. Of course, it didn’t take long for some of the shadier members of Halo 3’s player base to grow green with envy — Skyllus has reportedly had his Xbox Live account hacked three times since late October.

The latest hack that Skyllus has suffered has been particularly difficult on him, due to Live’s uncooperative customer service. After being told that there was nothing he could do to regain control of the account, and being given the runaround for a few hours, Skyllus had to settle for the promise of an investigation into the account in question.

Keep in mind that any kind of identity theft is illegal, especially if the hacker touches the victim’s credit cards (which are easily accessible through information on an XBL account). We hope that the digital notoriety that comes from wearing rare armor in a game is worth the risk of going to real-world jail.

(Thanks to everyone who sent this in!)

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Those who have found that 80 gigs is simply not enough to house all of those PlayStation Network games and hentai videos know the deal — it’s simple to replace the PlayStation 3’s hard drive.

Surprisingly, Sony seem to be all for the system modification. In one of the latest posts on their official blog, Sony’s "Social Media Manager" Jeff Rubenstein links to a CNET Asia tutorial on the process. He even gets a little cheap shot against the "competition" in.

"Fortunately, the PS3 doesn’t require some hard-to-find proprietary HDD," he writes.

Ooooh, burn! Who’s had success with upgrading their PS3 HDDs, and on a scale of "I can’t figure out how to upgrade my RAM" to "I build rocket ships in my spare time," how hard was it?

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Wii-a-phobia continues to run rampant amongst the hardcore gaming community. There is a new hate rant about the Wii written almost every day, and not just by random members of the internet, but often by paid journalists as well. Despite all this bad press, the Wii continues to be the darling of the mainstream gaming world (and cochroaches). More than a year after launch, the thing still sells out of stores faster that you can say "It’s a fad." 

So either way you look at it, the Wii console strikes a cord (ban pun intended). While a recent study cites "over 82% percent" of gamers polled believe the Wii hardware is "surprisingly stable", the gender identity of the console’s controller is a different matter, as the first reports of the Wii Nunchuck’s cord and analog stick turning pink are starting to surface on the internets. 

Did Nintendo rush these "confused" Nunchucks out with cheaper that usual components in order to meet the insane Christmas demand? Or is Nintendo actually run by Crab People, with these new "secret pink" nunchucks being just another attempt by the monsters to turn the world’s male population homosexual and stop all human reproduction?

[Via GoNintendo] 

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