Wavebird grey-market prices ridiculous; in other news: sky is blue

By Jeremy Yerby | January 2, 2009

Why did Nintendo axe the Wavebird again? For those of you who missed this news when it dropped almost exactly a year ago, Nintendo will no longer manufacture the wireless GameCube pad as of, well, the very beginning of last year. This news slipped past me completely unnoticed since, well, I was mainly rocking my games on the 360 and only occasionally played my Wii. However, over the past few weeks, I have begun a hot new love affair with my Wii. I’ve always had somewhat of a soft-spot for Nintendo but what really has me playing it the most right now is the holiday season has had many friends and relatives over, some gamers and some not, and the Wii really is the star of the console spotlight when it comes to entertaining more than one person in a room.

We’ve had many rousing games of Mario Kart Wii (finally got all the characters, something I’ve been putting off for forever) and Super Smash Bros. Brawl, and I even rekindled my addiction to Animal Crossing. However, all this added Wii activity and hosting several players at once made me dust off my old Wavebird controller because I ran out of Wii-motes. Little did I know the Wavebird was good for something other than VC and GCN games. Its the ideal way to play several of the system’s best games. I know, I know, most of you already knew that, sue me.

So I only have the one Wavebird, and not really thinking about it I strolled over to Walmart and GameStop, only to be disappointed in my hunt for another. I had thought that maybe Nintendo stopped making them, but the abundance of wired GCN controllers made me doubt that. Why on God’s green earth would they continue shipping those controllers with the absurdly short cords but not the Wireless Wonderland that is Wavebird? A quick search on eBay and my heart sunk: I saw one Buy It Now for the Sealed Wavebird priced at $115. Surely a price gouger, right? Well, I found that price to be pretty typical for the once $34.99 pad. Ugh.

The absurdity of this really baffles me. Surely someone at Nintendo plays with the system from time to time and realizes the Classic Controller is crap… I just must make sure my current Wavebird lasts a really long time I suppose.