It used to be you’d show up at the door with a dozen roses and a box of chocolates and you were set. Well, it doesn’t take many years for that to get old.

Why not give that special someone a Valentine’s day treat that goes hand in hand with their Nintendo Wii obsession? Paul Pape Designs now offers chocolate Mii’s for a very special and very geeky Valentine’s Day. They’re made with real Hershey’s chocolate, in white or brown and the most adorable touch(Or sickening, depending on your viewpoint) is the fact that they come in a box that resembles the Wii.

Along with Nyko’s new wireless Nunchuk controller, the company is showing off their Perfect Shot Wii gun. There have been some complaints about the Wii Zapper being very clumsy, especially in the trigger area, so this should be a great alternative.

It’s very reminiscent of the original Wii zapper in some ways and also looks and feels more like a real gun, with a decent grip. The Wiimote goes right on top, it has an easy trigger and shoots well.

The Shaft is another way to control all those Virtual Console downloads sitting on your Wii menu. The wired, 6″ x 11″ arcade-style stick from Overline Gaming merges the arcade joystick with the styling of the Wii.

It features analog control for N64 games as well as digital “resting points” in the eight primary directions for old school gaming. The general consensus seems to be that people like the feel of the shaft (I know. I know…) It will certainly bring that old arcade feeling back.

Easily overlooked next to the countless heavy hitters coming out of CES 2008, here we have this great new wireless controller for the Nintendo Wii.

Nyko’s new Wireless Nunchuk controller lets you play games without the annoying cable getting in your way, while you punch, fight or swing. How many times have you been in the zone only to be pulled out by the limits of the cable?

The Wii shark gun may just be one accessory too many. Does it jump the shark? Probably. I think the packaging says it all, showing a tough U.S. soldier in uniform aiming this thing at the target. Then in the lower right we see the typical James Bond like silhouette. Apparently the world loves this gun. I especially like the “Playing easily. Playing happily.” slogan. They left out, “Looking like a tool”.

You stick your Wiimote on the top, then hook up your Nunchuck to the shark’s ass and then get ready for hours of fun. I guess if you were actually playing a game that involved sharks it might not be so bad. If you absolutely have to have every Wii accessory, $10 is a fair price to pay for aiming a shark at your TV.

Wii sports has become quite a popular past time with the elderly. Especially bowling. Wii sports has gotten so big at the Riderwood complex in Montgomery County, Maryland that tournaments are held fairly often. The complex houses 3000-residents and one can only guess that at least half of them are now addicted to the Wii. Just recently a 79-year-old real world bowler was defeated by an 84-year-old who’d only recently got to know the Wii game.

Apparently, they get pretty riled up about these matches and have been known to actually remain awake long enough to compete. I would imagine that having a Wii handy probably keeps some of them more physically and mentally alert then they might otherwise be, which is a good thing. And you just know that they have a whole betting system in place too.

As if it hasn’t been hard enough to find a Nintendo Wii game console this year, rumor has it that a retail chain called Slackers is taking their shipments of the popular console and selling them on Ebay at a jacked up price.

According to Ars Technica an insider with Slackers stated that any Wiis that they receive, at least in the Illinois/Missouri area stores, are not available for the suggested $249 retail price at the store and are instead marked up to $499 on Ebay. Recently reports say that the Buy It Now price has been dropped to $399.99, which is still $150 over suggested retail by Nintendo.

Anyone that’s been interested in buying a Nintendo Wii this holiday season is aware of just how difficult it has been to get one and people are capitalizing on that fact, and so are many retailers. I purchased a Wii months ago that I had to stand in line one early morning to get, and even then I had to buy the $250 console bundled with two games for a total of $350. The Wii has seen a shortage for a year now and Nintendo says the lack of consoles available to meet demand is tough on planning for the company including creating any planning or promotions for new games. However, I can think of worse problems than having a consistently higher demand than supply.

According to Reggie Fils-Aime, president of Nintendo of America, Nintendo is also discouraging the practice of bundling the console itself with other items since the Wii loses its price advantage over competitor consoles like the Xbox 360 or the Sony PS3, but it is ultimately up to the retailers how they decide to sell the console. He also added that the power Nintendo held over what retailer they would ship consoles helped retailers adhere to the companies suggestions.

We get multiple requests here at the ‘Brick with people asking if we know where they can find a Wii console without taking it in the shorts on price, so we’re pretty excited to see some hope in the availability of the console from Nintendo before the year is out.

Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime announced the availability of rain checks for the Wii’s through Gamestop, and although getting one in January might be better than nothing at all there still might be a chance to get your hands on one yet this year. The Nintendo exec announced that seven national retailers should be putting Nintendo Wii consoles on shelves this weekend. The list of retailers include Best Buy, Target, Wal-Mart, Sears, Kmart, Toys R Us and Circuit City.

Maybe it isn’t a marketing scheme and Nintendo really is having trouble keeping up with production for the Nintendo Wii game console. Nintendo is offering hope for some of those still looking for Wii this holiday season, although opening a present with a piece of paper promising a Wii in a month just might not be the same as the real thing.

In a telephone press conference today Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime said they the company is working with GameStop to give out “rain checks” to those looking for an Wii this year with a deliver time frame in January of next year.

The marketing research firm NPD has turned in their analysis of what the top video game titles and consoles were last month and the news is very good for the industry as a whole. Leading the top in sales of new software was Activision’s “Call of Duty 4″ for the Microsoft Xbox 360 which sold an impressive 1.57 million copies. Nintendo’s “Super Mario Galaxy” came in second place and if you combine the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 sales for “Assassin’s Creed” it would actually take the silver medal. Not coincidentally Ubisoft’s “Assassin’s Creed” has emerged as the best-selling new IP for games in recent years.

Nintendo’s handheld DS gaming device sold an amazing 1.53 million units in November which was enough to give it the top of the chart for hardware sales. In second place was Nintendo’s Wii gaming console with 981,000 Wiis sold followed by Microsoft’s Xbox 360 in third spot with 770,000 units finding homes. Sony moved 577,000 PlayStation Portable to give it fourth place and the price drop in the PS3 convinced 466,000 consumers to go out and buy one of the consoles last month.

Time magazine has released its list of the top ten videogames of the year. Can you take a guess at what made their number one spot? If you guessed “Halo 3″ you don’t win a prize. “Like a pebble that has been rounded over the centuries by the gentle splashing of the ocean waves, ‘Halo 3′ has become the perfect hardcore first-person combat simulator,” said Time in their idol worship of the Xbox 360 killer app. “By dint of painstaking labor on the part of its developer, Bungie, it has been refined over three installments to the point where it delivers only pure, unadulterated gaming bliss.” Who knew that the editors at Time were down with playing some Master Chief deathmatches?

Of the titles that made Time’s best of 2007 list six are exclusive to one videogame system, of which three are for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and one each for Sony’s PlayStation 2, Nintendo’s DS and Wii console systems. Why didn’t at least one PlayStation 3 exclusive title make it on Time’s list? And no “Guitar Hero III” (or is that game now redundant that “Rock Band” is out and lets you play drums as well as guitar?)

Let me start off by saying: Did I fall asleep and miss everyone striking oil in their backyard? Well, apparently so. And it seems that we need still more jewel-encrusted devices(This is worse then the Bedazzler making Jean jacket wearers into Rhinestone Cowboys in the 80’s.), since Crystal Icing wants to embellish your DS Lite with images of Mario and a flying Koopa for $350.

If that doesn’t satisfy your attraction to shiny objects, how about a custom Wii console covered with thousands of Swarovski crystals? One Wii pimped out in a Zelda theme was detailed with over 7500 24-Karat gold-dipped crystals. If you are interested in the price, you’ll have to follow the link. I’m too scared to look.

Black Friday seems to have had a positive benefit for sluggish sales of not just Sony’s PlayStation 3 but for Nintendo’s Wii system. Over 350,000 Wiis were sold last week, 50,000 more than what was sold the week before that. The Thanksgiving week represents the second-best sales plateau for Nintendo’s latest game console, beaten only by the launch week of the Wii in 2006.

Meanwhile the sales of Sony’s PlayStation 3 increased in November 298% over the sales in October. Part of that dramatic spike in PS3s finding their forever homes must be from Sony’s price drop of the $399 40GB unit. The price drop even had its effect in Japan where the Wii has been the dominant next gen gaming console for consumers: for the first time since the PS3’s launch more of the Sony consoles were sold to gamers than Wiis.

In a strange bit of Nintendo Wii/Mii news is the tale of the soldier serving in Iraq who sent his Wii home to the states just before he was headed home himself. When he got home his friends told him that his wife might have been less then faithful while he was away. His wife claimed she’d only kissed the suspect, a professional bowler, one time.

He might have dismissed it perhaps, but then he visited the Mii channel and saw a Mii that he didn’t create. Then he went into the Wii message board and saw the calendar option that showed the many nights his wife’s Mii and this other Mii played Wii bowling together. The Pro bowler’s Mii bore a striking resemblance to the man. So the husband has now filed for divorce.