When You Buy a Wii U, Don’t Expect To Play It Immediately

I, like many Americans, picked up the new Wii-U from Nintendo at midnight on November 18th. It's basically a Wii with some added features, but there were a few games I was looking forward to playing. What I didn't expect was how long it was going to take to update.

You see, once upon a time, one could simply buy a Super Nintendo, plug it in the wall, plug it in the TV, pop in a cartridge and start playing from the get-go. Now that newer systems can download additional features and patches and more with online connectivity, they'll have status updates to keep it up to date. When the Wii U launched, it was released without a few apps so one of the very first things you have to do is sit and wait through a very long system update.

I got back home around 12:20 a.m., plugged everything in and proceeded to walk through all of the prompts to get everything set up. Then, the longest system update I've ever experienced.

Three hours.

That's right, and even after three hours of updating, there were a few more hoops to jump through before I could finally play anything. So I didn't sleep empty-gamed, I played one level of Super Mario Bros. U and went to bed just after 4:00 a.m.

Now that everything is good to go, I'm looking forward to checking it out later today, but I'm just letting you know that if your child is impatient (and whose child isn't?) you may want to install everything first before giving it as a gift.

My Nintendo Network name is johnblueriggs - feel free to add me!