IGN's final retail Wii system arrived at the office this morning, and we have been delving into the beauty of this mysterious new console ever since. After booting up the system and entering our system settings, we were shocked to discover that although we could see the different Wii channels, we could not access those that needed an Internet connection without an initial upgrade.
It seems that the Wii needs this upgrade in order to be able to connect to the Weather, News or Shop Channels. Unfortunately, when we tried to run this upgrade, we were treated to an error screen informing us that our Wii was unable to connect to the network. It seems that, prior to launch, the Wii will not have access to any of the channels or applications that require the user to connect to Nintendo's network. That's bad news for those of you out there intent on getting a Wii before November 19.
This revelation came as a shock and a disappointment to many at IGN, as it would have been nice to download some classic games for the Virtual Console. We will keep you posted on any later developments.