

Important note for all your podcast-fans. We will be doing the live-stream sometime around 11 AM EST this morning. I have a family obligation, which has bumped up the podcast time. No worries, news updates will continue on their weekend schedule as usual. If I didn’t tell you that I had family obligations, you would have never noticed a difference! Once again, live-stream podcast sometime around 11 PM EST. We hope to see you in the IRC!

I’m off to bed for the night, gang. Thanks for letting me slip out on a Friday night. I hope you were out and about doing much more fun things than sitting at a computer! See you all in a few, short hours.

I can’t think of a better way to kick off a weekend. This is one of the most heart-warming stories I’ve heard in awhile. Reader PsyduckWarrior and his family were involved in quite a horrible event. While the first part of the story is far from happy, it ends with a bit of a bright spot, thanks to Nintendo. Instead of summarizing the story, I thought I’d let PsyduckWarrior tell it in his own words.

I am a 21 year old Junior in college and as part of my Sports Administration courses, I had to intern as a coach at a local high school. I chose to go home to the high school I graduated from and I moved in with my parents so that I could save a little cash.

On September 19th, while my parents and I were at work, our house caught fire. By the end of the day, we had lost everything we owned, save what ever we had in our vehicles. The most important thing was that no one in my family was hurt except for a couple of pets (I lost my pet scorpion and my parents lost their cat).

In the days that followed, we had to make inventories of everything we lost. We didn’t have insurance so this was merely so we could find out exactly what we lost and what we could replace in the short term. My list, when it was done, included more than 250 Nintendo games spanning all their consoles, every Nintendo console, almost all accessories, every Gameboy iteration, a DS…I had a lot of Nintendo stuff…including a working Virtual Boy and a Gameboy Light (a Japanese Gameboy Pocket with a backlight). My collection wasn’t very extensive but it had some things that most people wouldn’t. My mom also owned a Wii and a DS and a few games, which were lost as well (in fact, the fire was so hot in the living room that there was no trace of her gaming stuff…it had been completely melted and just dissipated).

As time went on, our community helped us out so much by giving us a place to stay, money, clothes, and food.

About a month ago, I contacted Nintendo to ask about what I should do about the Wiiware account my Wii had on it and how I should go about suspending it for when I get a new one. Included in the letter were pictures of some of my gaming stuff I could salvage from the rubble as part of a morbid curiosity thing (ever want to see what a melted Wii looks like? So did many of my friends).

About two weeks later, I received a call from Nintendo’s Customer Service Department. They had received my packet and wanted to find out how my family and I were getting along. I told them about what had happened and how we were doing. Then, they offered me to replace my Wii and my Gameboy Advance SP for free. They even threw in all the cords for the Wii and the charger and such for the SP! I was blown away that the company would want to know how my family was doing let alone want to help out. I sent off my old, melted Wii and SP and received my new ones.

In the past Nintendo has been helpful to me when I had a problem with a console, but this above and beyond anything I expected. It isn’t everything my family and I had, but it helps a little bit to getting our lives back to ‘normal’.