I have stupid levels of hype for Nintendo’s upcoming game Splatoon.  It has more style than any one title should rightly be allowed to have, and everything they’ve been releasing about the online suggests that they are gearing this thing directly at people who just want to jump online and get down to the business of covering other players in paint, without worrying about getting stomped by premade teams or learning a dozen maps all at once or dealing with toxic people with microphones.

Of course, the drawback is that it’s exclusive to the WiiU, a console which – as of this writing – is still a million units shy of catching up to the Sega Dreamcast in terms of lifetime sales.

It will get there, of course, there’s no doubt about that, but it’s still Nintendo’s biggest flop since the Virtual Boy.

Full disclosure: I owned a Virtual Boy and am entitled to make fun of it.

Fortunately for Nintendo, I have a soft spot in my head for underdog consoles, and they ARE making a new Fatal Frame V for this thing, and I guess I’d like to play Bayonetta 2 and Rodea is supposed to be pretty amazing and…

…so long story short, I wound up at Best Buy a few days ago preordering the Splatoon console bundle.

And the guy behind the register rings up my preorder, and gives me my receipt for the deposit, and says “just so you know, they’re putting the demo up for download tonight.”

…

I confess I gave him a more quizzical look than normal at that point, but he appeared to be quite earnest in his enthusiasm and I couldn’t bring myself to point out that the demo wouldn’t actually do me much good without the console that I had just ordered from him.

Anyway, this gives me about three weeks to let myself get properly overwhelmed by hype.