Tag: Wii

Thieves steal tons of now cheap consoles

Thieves! Stealers! Potential hoarders! All of these words describe the culprits behind a theft in SeaTac where 7000 Wii consoles were stolen from a warehouse. Seven thousand! That’s enough to create your own artificial shortage of the consoles and be very effective about it…if it were the year 2006 again. Nintendo created their own artificial shortage of the console during the entire first year that the Wii was out.

Now, in the year 2012, a Wii console can be purchased for between 120 and 130 dollars. So, have fun sitting on that giant number of Wii units, guys!

Senior citizen discount does NOT equal five finger discount

Jennie T. Gatses, from Homer Glen, Illinois, was caught by security guards at the local Dominick’s stuffing four cans of crab meat and four Wii games in her purse while out with the grandchildren.

While Gatses claimed “she was going to pay for the items once her grandchildren were in the car”, a quick record search showed that she’s been busted for retail theft a number of times previously. So she was promptly busted again.

Some might say that she’s setting a bad example for the kids. On the contrary! She’s clearly showing them that persistence yields succ…no, it’s still failure. Never mind.

Wii would like to sentence you

A Florida man whose home was notoriously raided by undercover detectives who stopped to play Wii bowling (who were subsequently sanctioned for their actions) has agreed to a plea bargain that will send him to prison for three years.

Michael Difalco, of Lakeland, Florida was sentenced on Tuesday to three years in the state pen and surrendered a ton of property under civil asset forfeiture laws. He was the drug dealer who caught narcotics detectives on camera playing his Wii, 20 minutes into a raid on his home.

The officers received “retraining” and a letter of reprimand. Though Difalco’s lawyer and other defense attorneys in the area raised objections to the police conduct, the search was not invalidated. DENIED. The worst it got for law enforcement was a viral video of one rather large and in charge detective jumping up and down after nailing two strikes in a row on Wii Sports’ bowling mini-game.

Apple not in the pesticide business … yet

This time it isn’t an employee falling off a roof or out of a window. This time, it’s pesticide.

Foxconn, the world’s largest manufacturer of electronics, is responsible for assembling the Xbox 360, the PS3, the Wii, the iPhone and more. Another thing it’s famous for: the death of its employees by suicide, along with “alleged” pressuring by industry giants regarding their products.

After 250 workers at the company’s Chennai, India plant were hospitalized, Foxconn had no choice but to shut the facility down. Workers experienced what has been described as “sensations of giddiness and nausea”. According to Foxconn, this “may have been caused by the routine spraying of pesticide at the production facility.” Whoops.

Out of the 250 hospitalized workers, 28 are still in the hospital. The plant is responsible for mobile phone parts.

For Bryan McBournie, it might be more prudent to exclaim, “Where Is Your Clean Air Now?”

Wii would like to be generous with taxpayers’ money

A state minister from Victoria, Australia has been publicly rebuked after personally campaigning, in parliament, for one of his constituents to be given a Wii.

Gordon Rich-Phillips, a member of the Liberal Party and Victoria’s Assistant Opposition Treasurer, got up in parliament and asked that Victoria’s WorkCover Authority (the worker’s comp guys) pay for “a certain rehabilitation aid” for a man that claims he’s been unable to work for four years due to a “work-related injury”. Oh sure, that might sound reasonable, but he only made the plea in parliament because WorkCover had already knocked the man’s claims back, on the grounds that this “rehabilitation aid” was in fact a Nintendo Wii console and a copy of Wii Fit.

“Gordon Rich-Phillips is saying we should spend WorkCover money on video games when the claim has already been assessed and knocked back,” WorkCover Minister Tim Holding said.

The man asking for the Wii, meanwhile, says that it’s necessary for his rehabilitation because, in addition to his injury, he also suffers from severe panic attacks, which presumably keeps him from both the physio and the gym. Sorry guy, but I haven’t seen them make a WiiTherapist yet.

Wii would like to get robbed

We’re not quite out of this recession stuff yet. As such, we all need some extra money every now and then. A pair of women from Toledo, Ohio thought it would be a good idea to try and sell their Nintendo Wii consoles via Craigslist. Ladies: it is never a good idea to conduct video game business over Craigslist.

For that matter, it’s never a good idea to conduct any business over Craigslist.

In two completely unrelated incidents, one woman was assaulted when a prospective “purchaser” came to her home.

“As I kind of went to close the screen door, he then proceeded to come in,” she said. “He punched me in the face, grabbed the Wii off the end of the table and was gone before I even knew it.”

The other lady’s transaction went by without a hitch. Or so she thought. After the buyer had left with the console, however, the lady noticed they’d paid in counterfeit bills. Double burn!

A bump on the noggin will get your engine going

Welcome to one of the best headlines in a long time. According the news wire, 24 year-old Briton Amanda Flowers has become a “sex addict” after falling off her Wii Fit board.

That’s just rich.

It seems that, courtesy of the fall, she’s developed persistent sexual arousal syndrome. Now any time Amanda is around anything vibrating or pulsing, like a mobile phone or blender, she becomes aroused. Like I said, her engine is going.

“It began as a twinge down below before surging through my body”, she says of the onset of an attack.

Provided this is actually and truly a real story, this isn’t one hundred percent great for Amanda. On the one hand, she went from playing Wii Fit to developing a serious condition. On the other, most people that fall off things get hurt, not a bunch of unprovoked orgasms.

Guess who got the better deal?

Christmas is long gone, which means that the spirit of giving has been replaced by far more important spirits — namely the spirit of taking, the spirit of drinking and the spirit of being a stupid dick. A 23-year-old man from Spring Hill, Florida stole his mother’s Wii and sold it, all for booze and smokes.

It’s like these people are trying to make stories for us.

Of course, Christopher Bayko wasn’t exactly a master criminal, and somehow expected to get away with stealing a game console from right under his mother’s nose. When questioned about the missing Wii, which was now sitting comfortably in a pawn shop, Bayko claimed it was at a friend’s house. We’ll never know how long he planned to keep that pretense up, because the shining example of moral superiority left a receipt lying around the house that disproved his lie.

Oh, and for those wondering, the Wii was sold for an amazingly large cost of 56 dollars.

Wii would like to not get caught on camera

Remember the law enforcement professionals down in Florida who killed time on a drug raid by bowling up big scores on a drug kingpin’s Wii? Well, 11 of them got sanctioned for their conduct. Of course, not that badly, mind you.

All of them, whose names aren’t being published because they were working undercover, got reassignments and retraining. Nobody lost their job, which probably is fair enough. It was embarrassing as you can believe to the Polk County Drug Task Force but, despite the pleading of the kingpin’s lawyer, their conduct did not invalidate the search.

Caught in the blast: six detectives, a deputy, and four sergeants. The detectives got “a letter of retraining” and “two hours of retraining.” The supervising sergeants got a “letter of guidance” and “four hours of retraining.”

Retraining? Like what, how to put better spin on the Wiimote?

Wii would like to bust your drugs

Guns drawn, cops busted down the door of a suspected south Florida drug dealer, then proceeded to rock it out – on Wii bowling. A security cam captured some playing video games while others searched for drugs and weapons.

A sheriff’s detective assigned to catalog the goods repeatedly bowled frames – and when she nailed strikes on two in a row, she raised her arms triumphantly, jumping and kicking.

Chiefs of police in three other jurisdictions forming the task force that performed the raid likewise bemoaned the bad publicity. But it could have been much worse than that. At least those two Japanese guys in the Nintendo commercials didn’t show up at the door while the cop was making some strikes.