I get it, not everybody is a fan of the Mini NES. Yes, you could buy an Original NES and Cartridges (for an expansive price). Yes, you could use an Emulator (which, baring the legality discussions, isn't exactly the most "authentic" experience, especially if you want to play on a TV without having to move your PC). Yes, you could build your own NES with the Raspberry Pi (but again have to deal with price and all the install stuff). For me, though, it was a perfect little package; something small which I could just plugin and play through some of the most important games I've never tried before (such as the Mario, Metroid or LoZ games).
Nintendo has, as is their historic (and outdated) business model, promised to deliver FAR less units than meets demand. It's great for their profit margins, but it's awful for us consumers, especially those of us who were looking to get one in before the busy Christmas rush (I know quite a few upset parents over this). And yes, Nintendo will do another run, but it probably won't be until long after the holiday season, when everybody will have moved on and stopped giving a stuff.
Australian retailers got SLIM pickings as far as orders go. With very high demand and low stock to sell, the stores have had to work doubly hard to try and be as fair about distribution as possible. On Monday Morning, JB Hi-Fi gave us a shock when it, completely unannounced, opened pre-ordered for 10 minutes on their online store. They sold out the entire stock loving quickly.
While JB went for the quiet approach, EB Games made their style loud and proud; online-only preorders would be available at 12PMAEDT on Monday, first in best dressed. And what a complete clusterforget that was.
http://www.mcvpacific.com/index.php/news/read/eb-games-site-crashes-as-new-nes-classic-edition-stock-becomes-available/0175275Not -2 minutes before stock was set to go online, the entire website became a clusterforget of error pages and timeouts. It was so bad, after just an hour EB Games declared on their Twitter that they would push the sale to today, and would in the meantime attempt to increase capacity of their website to ensure it didn't happen again.
forget.
http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2016/11/bad-news-eb-games-is-officially-sold-out-of-the-mini-nes/With the only advice from EB being "Don't login to your accounts, use the Guest profile to preorder the NES", for 1 hour and 30 minutes, rabbid consumers (like myself) were kept in the dark as we faced the exact same problems (worse this time, in fact) all over again. Users were being served the homepage from the server software that the website uses...and thanks to the problems, Twitter was even more heated the previous day. It got FAR worse when EB Games finally made the dreaded announcement.
MINI NES CONSOLE UPDATE:
Thank you for your patience. The Nintendo Classic Mini NES Console has now sold out.
Only 4 people on Twitter had mentioned being successful at claiming their preorder; many fans had been charged the $10 deposit WITHOUT any confirmation of the preorder, and most people (like myself) failed to make it past the address entry screen (some couldn't even see their checkout). Because the EB Games website does NOT lock stock that's inside a person's basket (as any rational web developer would setup), many fans lost out the chance to preorder the goods they thought they had claimed.
There's no apology in sight, nor any word of the next batch from Nintendo's end. Maybe I'm wrong to be a little miffed, but it's just so damn frustrating to wait for two days, battle massive server lag and basically lose out on what was essentially a lucky draw because I didn't get the pages served to me when I needed them.
To all you people getting a Mini NES soon, congratulations. To all the scalpers, or people purchasing from the scalpers, you're part of the problem and it's a loving shame that you've chosen to take part in such scumbag behaviour. All I know is I'm going to focus on buying products from digital retailers in future; forget this noise.
