It looks like there will be no Mario Kart tournament in our apartment this afternoon.  The disk drive in our Wii is broken.  It makes a terrible noise, the sort of noise that sounds like CD death, so we have stopped using it.  I went online to buy a new one but was surprised that it’s more than twice the price in Japan compared to the UK.  A UK one is no good to me but the price differences did make me look into this a bit more.  It turns out that there is going to be a new Wii released before the end of the year, and it will be released in the UK before Japan.

It would be silly to buy one today.  I imagine that when the new one is released in December that the old one will come down in price.  The new one looks interesting but it’s not going to be possible to buy that in Japan when it is released as most stores have stopped taking pre-orders as they can’t meet demand.  Looks like I’ll be waiting a while before I get to play again.