Like I said before, it's been a good long time since Melee, and it will be another long wait for the next one. I, like Wii owners across the U. S. of A., have already begun to prepare for this nigh-holy event. Here's a brief photo-essay on my personal pre-Brawl ritual.

First, the removal of Wii Sports from the console. I swear, this was not some kind of fabricated editorial comment on the lack of high-quality, top-selling Wii games. I honestly did have Wii Sports last loaded, because I did some boxing and bowling with Clark.

Battery check on my three Remotes. Bad news all around. The P3 Remote is actually so dead that it won't even register.

But the silver lining... I won't be using any of these to play Brawl. A-duh.

Pop off the GameCube port door. Yes, it comes off. In fact, Nintendo specifically wants you to detach the door if you're planning on using GameCube controllers.

Incidentally, I hear the Classic Controller works fine... for those of you who desire normal, non-waggle controls but never owned a GameCube.

Plug in the Wavebird transmitters. Give those Nintendo engineers a stamp for the day, because those legacy Wavebird thumbs fit fine on a horizontally-oriented Wii. I think the PS2 is glaring at it.

Ever since the Sony HDTV showed up, I had to move the Wii to the smaller shelves. So it no longer stands upright in that now-iconic way. It gets pretty bloody hot under the little white box (no bigger than three DVD cases, states Perrin Kaplan!), a problem no doubt exacerbated by the poor air flow in my entertainment center.

Now to find the GameCube peripherals. This drawer used to be a lot denser; I only recently moved the DK Bongos to the basement.

Roll call: two Wavebirds, ready to take the lead. The two wired controllers will be reserved for special multiplayer occasions. Note that the orange controller ("spice," in Nintendo's parlance of the times) has a nice loose loop going. That's because I'm a goddamn professional who has never wrapped a cable so tightly around the controller that it would develop bends and kinks.

The black controller is actually virginal, factory-fresh. Never been used. So that's some Nintendo-sweatshop-made cabling. Behind the noob is a pair of cable extenders, which are unfortunately third-party only because Nintendo never manufactured first-party cable extenders.

And, naturally, one Wii Remote to turn the game on. Shouldn't need much battery power for that.