I have been enjoying my Nintendo Wii quite a bit lately.
For those of us lucky enough to get one, they’re pretty fun. Wii Sports, the game that comes with the console, never seems to get old enough not to play. I am currently rated at 1900 in Tennis, so I should very likely ease back on playing it.
Anyway, just yesterday my order arrived from Amazon. I am tired of driving around to try to find wii things as everyone is always sold out and annoyed with having to tell 500 nerds a day that they don’t have any and they really do not know when more will be in. It is just way easier to order from Amazon and have it show up in a couple of days.
So yesterday I had a few Wii things arrive:
An extra remote.
“Wii Remote Controller” (Nintendo of America)
A charging station with some NMh battery pack replacements so I can stop using AA batteries.
“Wii Charge Station” (NYKO Technologies)
and also Super Paper Mario
“Super Paper Mario” (Nintendo)
This new Mario game is funny, entertaining, challenging, and for a change, well translated.
The jokes are funny and not a direct translation from some odd Japanese humor that American audiences tend not to be able to follow. It took a while, but it seems that Nintendo finally hired someone who is a native english speaker to come up with the dialogue for their games.
A very good idea.
I’m also surprised at the charging station. It works really well. I’m used to third party accessories being real trash, but this is pretty decent so far.
One problem worth mentioning is that you have to dig out the Wii manual to figure out how to provision or synchronize the new controller to your Wii.
I don’t know where my Wii box is anymore, and searching for logical keywords wasn’t getting me anywhere.
After I was lucky enough to find scans of the Wii manual from the fine people at Gamepro, I was able to get the new controller working.
They key part of this, as opposed to the one-time Wii controller use which can be accessed in the remote options by hitting the home button on one of the controllers that has been “standard synced” with the Wii console (which all of the controllers that ship with the Wii are).
To sync a new controller, you need to turn on the Wii console by pressing the power button on the face of the console itself, not the other Wii controller. Then press the sync button on the new controller, which is underneath the battery cover. Then press the red sync button on the face of the Wii console found under a hatch next to the disk opening and between the reset and eject buttons.
If you did this in quick enough succession, your new Wii remote should be synced with the console and you can use it to turn it on and off and actually use it to play games.
Oddly enough, these instructions are not given on the package of the extra Wii controllers and Wii manuals are not found on the Nintendo website. If you were having the same problems that I was, hopefully you were able to find this review.
