It was an amazing trip across the country and between the stops at Graceland, catching sight of a 72oz steak, a 4lb hamburger and the Liberace Museum, I even managed to see some video game related things . Arcades in truck stops, game stations in fast food joints and the Spike VGAs, not to mention the myriad video poker machines in Vegas. Sure, you could argue that those aren't video games, but Xbox LIVE has Texas Hold 'Em which is basically the same thing. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Reporting to you live from my favorite cafe in San Francisco, I will be bringing you some of the stories from the road mixed in with the regular enormous dearth of news there always is on the weekends and especially around the holidays. Hopefully there will be something in there that will interest you.

I never really thought I'd miss writing twenty four articles a weekend, but damn it's good to be back

Only two emails have made their way into Kotaku central so far of dead Wii.

In the first report, the reader says that the system worked sporadically for an hour and then he started getting disc read errors. Now his Wii read games about five percent of the time.

The second reader's Wii went belly-up in the middle of his network set-up.

After the long hard months of waiting for my wii, was able to get one at target this morning. I get home, set it up, power it on and go through the initial setup. I decide to configure the online settings next, click the first connection profile, and it shuts off. Dead. I try reseating everything, but it's dead. Trying to call nintendo service, but all lines are busy, they won't even let you wait for an operator. Called Target, but of course they don't have any more.

At least that last story has a happy ending. The tipster wrote back a few hours later to say he was able to get through to Nintendo and they are sending him both a new Wii and a free power supply. I assume an extra. Both should be there in three to four days. Brian Crecente