If you want to see this glorious screen on your TV come Christmas, then you’ll need a Nintendo Classic Mini NES. And if you want to get one of those without paying an exorbitant amount to a hawker on Ebay, you’ll need to buy from a retailer.
EB Games tried to kick off their second round of pre-orders yesterday, only for their site to crash in a fireball of disappointment. So the retailer is reopening pre-orders today.
The link is to pre-order is here.
Because EB couldn’t handle the flood of interest, and their Twitter was essentially a rolling apology to customers more or less saying there’s nothing they could do about it, today is the second opportunity to get in on the second round of pre-orders for the mini Nintendo console.
Yesterday they said that they had increased their server capacity to handle “anywhere up to 60,000 simultaneous customers” on their website. Given how much EB made a point of saying how few units they had, I’m pretty sure that means that the second shipment today will be gone in a couple of minutes.
If the site doesn’t crash again, at any rate. 60,000 isn’t a whole lot of people, especially if everyone rushes to the site at the exact same time.
Remember: everything kicks off at 12:00 PM AEDT (10:00 AM for Perth, 11:00 AM in Queensland and 11:30 AM in Adelaide).
For those looking to get extra controllers or accessories: try and buy them now. The same link will take you to pre-orders for the Mini NES when they’re open, too.
To speed up the process, you might as well go and sign up for an EB World account. It will allow you to have your billing and shipping details saved automatically, which should shave some crucial seconds off the buying process. (And if EB are expecting more than 30,000 customers at least to be hitting the site at its peak, every second counts.)
In the interim, re-read all the fury from customers who couldn’t complete their orders yesterday. I swear you won’t see history repeating today. Honest.
Comments
32 responses to “Nintendo Classic Mini NES Pre-Orders Kick Off Today, Again”
Question: Nintendo AUNZ now has an official ebay store, why don’t they use it for the Mini NES?
Also, did Amazon crash last week, or did its stock simply get completely drained?
I can’t quite believe Amazon could crash.
Amazon didn’t crash but their handing of it was a fiasco.
Like a lucky few I was there when orders were being taken and almost landed an unit.
Long story short, when they went live they later found they didn’t the order to US only residents. As a result people like me missed out as they faked an out of stock error so they could change the item details.
And it only got worse from there; despite being the same company that gave us EC2, there were numerous reports of people adding the item to the cart and only to have the cart appear empty when they went to check out the unit.
So while the site didn’t go under, the handing was still botched and Amazon have only added insult to injury by constantly censoring and removing posts about the bad checkout experiences.
Why isn’t that news?
They are still reeling from Trump winning. Furthermore, how can they report on it if Amazon keeps deleting the posts about the checkout failures?
actually it would be 9am here in Perth
And now we wait for the inevitable angry tweets/facebook posts from people that couldn’t get one because eb games doesn’t have anywhere near enough stock for everybody to get one.
Nintendo grossly underestimated how popular these things would be.
where is the link? nothing on their site shows about where to go for the presale.
I have absolutely no interest in a Mini-NES, I’ve got a full sized one that works just fine. Buuuuuut scarcity is making me consider attempting to pre-order one.
I have a problem. Send help.
And some people think that Nintendo isn’t limiting the stock on purpose…
They’re getting coverage by all major gaming news outlets, with several articles a day – and causing people who didn’t really care about the NES mini to want one.
I gave up. Got a Raspberry Pi 3 instead and I’m going to run RetroPi with some USB SNES controllers.
No controllers is a real annoyance!
But I did find out that if you use a Wii Classic Controller, you can use the Home button to go back to the game select screen. This makes it much easier, and addresses Jason’s biggest issues with it.
I have the NES Mini and I would recommend using the Wii Classic Controller. The home button is excellent, but you can also use the left stick in some games rather than the control pad. The reason why I say some games is that I haven’t tested it with all games. One thing though, you can’t use two Wii Classic Controllers at the same time.
Website already struggling. Account login seems to have crashed entirely
Yep, I got logged out and it keeps saying my username/password is incorrect.
Well done EB – managed to make it worse than yesterday..
And now some spastic activated the sale as pick up in store only… Hurr Durr
Yeh sites cactus again
Don’t fret!
Looks like we’ve had a problem. We should be back up again soon.
1 min before it went onsale ….
The ebgames.com.au page isn’t working
ebgames.com.au is currently unable to handle this request.
HTTP ERROR 503
Managed to log in, actually managed to add to cart, then the site buckles.
Hey, at least I got further than 90% of most people.
Same thing. Had one in the basket & it crashed
Turns out my luck went a bit further but still no dice.
I managed to get to the point of confirming payment but the site crapped itself.
This is where I finally gave up.
It was in my cart. The site crashed.
Just as bad as yesterday. First, couldn’t sign in to your EB account, then, when the NES was listed, it was initially “Pick up in store only”, then refreshed to “Online only”, then got one in my basket, signed in to my account ok (Finally), then site crashed going to check out
service unavailable now
Oh geez, I felt like I got so close this time… ;_;
I don’t know why they don’t just do it as a lottery.
Site has already gone down in flames.
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand it’s down.
Site’s 404’d now… Like other people here, I had one in my cart and was about to enter payment details.
So…. I guess we do this again same time tomorrow?
I got to the payment screen with Paypal login, so I thought I was home but the ebgames site never sent the token to the paypal site. So close.
“Put your little hand in mine…”
I expect their Twitter telling people to log-out and order again helped, with additional tabs getting opened.
“I swear you won’t see history repeating today. Honest.”
Keep swearing. I am.
Fuck EB. They get so much money from me, yet if I can’t get in on the weekend to pick up my preorder, they will HAPPILY sell it from under me.
Yet they won’t even make an online order smooth and achievable.
0/10