Traveling with your consoles is always somewhat stressful. “Should I buy a case for it or just throw it in a box? Maybe this backpack will do; surely it won’t break there.” You have many options at your disposal, but let this post be a lesson to you: never trust the original packaging. Or, at the very least, be smarter than me.
I might be of an odd sort. I like to keep the boxes to the electronics I own. Sometimes it becomes a burden because there is a ton of space that gets wasted in closets, but I have always felt that, if needed, the manufacturer’s packaging for transporting their brand new, expensive electronics is probably the best thing to use for travel. The stuff inside probably won’t get damaged, right?
I have yet to have an original box let me down until now. Having needed to travel with my Wii, I put the console into its white box. If you recall, this box has two blue “shelves” that hold the console and its components. My Wii fit snugly back in its spot, ready to travel. This is where I made my error, and where I ultimately cannot blame the box: I didn’t cover the console with anything that might protect it. Thinking that that was the box’s job, I did not think that while the console was inside anything would happen. I was wrong. SO WRONG.
It turns out that the blue slide-outs scratched the heck out of my Wii, and in doing so, implanted blue stains into the cuts. So far I have yet to find a good method of wiping off the blue, settling to just accept that my poor Wii will have blue rubbings forever. That poor bastard.
The irony here is that I have a bag made for transporting the Wii. It’s a little green backpack that has a Hylian shield on the back. I didn’t use it because while it’s good for taking the Wii by itself, I had to stack the console in the back of a car, and the box was better suited for that task. If only time machines existed.
So remember: always keep the plastic your consoles are wrapped in when they come right out of the box, it may save you from a blueing later on.