Via The Tanooki, among others.

I bet he rocks at Cooking Mama too … if you don’t mind getting your Wiimote covered in dog slobber.

More at Hack a Wii.

A quick search on Flickr for ‘wii’ pulls up lots of smiling faces and flailing arms, reminding me of our last family gathering with the Wii. Here’s a few of my favorites (sorry, can’t embed Flickr photos here .. you’ll have to follow the links):

One happy kid opens the box ..

A kid with Cerebal Palsy plays baseball with his sister (which is impressive, disabled or not … I personally find Wii Sports Baseball is HARD)

… Age is no barrier … now we’ve just gotta get these guys into some ‘hardcore’ games and encourage third-party developers to release some titles to capture the ‘grey dollar’.

I don’t know what game requires a lunge like that …

There’s tons like this, and more at the Wii Motion Flickr pool … dedicated to photos of people having fun with their Wii. It’s like a peek into the living rooms of those lucky few who will unwrap a Wii come Christmas morning.

The new version of the Photo Channel, version 1.1, is also now available … this is the slightly controversial one that removes MP3 support and replaces it with AAC format support. Luckily, Nintendo has allowed users who bought a Wii with the original MP3-supporting Photo Channel (v1.0) to upgrade to v1.1, and later downgrade back to v1.0 if they want to regain MP3 support. Good move Nintendo, allowing reversible upgrades …. of course it would have been nicer if the new Photo Channel simply supported BOTH MP3 and AAC, but that would have probably required twice the licensing fees …

The “sometimes controversial” Jeff Gerstmann reviews the new Eidos game Kane and Lynch and gives it a mediocre score. Most other reviewers agree with his analysis.

Jeff Gerstmann is fired.

Accusations and speculation fly that Eidos put pressure on Gamespot to fire Gerstmann, since Gamespot also has some advertising deals with Eidos.

It looks like Eidos also might have put some fake or misrepresented review scores on the official Kane and Lynch site.

There are lots of interesting responses to these events, debating the state of ethics in game journalism and the state of game reviews in general.

So far there has been little comment of interest from the parties actually involved, but it will be certainly interesting to see how this all plays out. Gamespot has already lost a huge amount of credibility in my book, but lets see how they do the damage control …

Turns out, you can fit the official Nintendo WiiMote covers over the third party covers just fine (the third party covers are very thin, about 1 mm thick) . You just have to be careful to not shift the third party cover too much as you put on the official clear cover, else the rubber may obscure some buttons. Once it’s on, it seem to stay put and not slip around. I’ve tested it out on Warioware: Smooth Moves .. a game that requires lots of grip changing, and I didn’t find any problems. Still not sure if I really like the Nintendo covers, but if it stop me breaking a Wii Remote, it’s worth the slight cosmetic drawback.

Want your own uber-cool coloured Wii Remote jackets ?

Get some from Amazon by clicking on the pics.

Here’s hoping Edmund eventually gets his meeting and all goes well. Fingers crossed we will all be able to enjoy the glory that is Gish on the Wii in the near future.

Via: WiiWii, via Go Nintendo

Part of Aaron’s report also covers the PAL vs. NTSC televison format issue that Nintendo always uses to justify having multiple “regions”, and region locking of games. His conclusions highlight what I have always suspected … most people in Australia/NZ/Pacific regions have multi-format televisions these days, and region locking to prevent PAL “regions” using NTSC games is nothing more than a way to give Nintendo more control of the local market and ultimately make them more money, at the cost of the consumer. Region locking helps prevent consumers benefiting from cheaper parallel imports from other regions (ie, Australian Wii owners cannot benefit from a surplus of unsold copies of “Red Steel” made for the Asian or US market). Sure, modchips (which are legal in Australia) get around this problem, but Nintendo’s recent crackdown on modchips in recent firmware updates makes this an annoying cat-n-mouse game that most Wii owners don’t want to play.

Of course, if there was no region locking, those who have NTSC (or multi-format) televisons in Australia could buy the import version, while the very very few Wii owners who don’t have a multi-format TV can wait for the PAL version. Alas, Nintendo have shown time and time again that they are complete control freaks when it comes to this type of thing. The only way to convince the “big N” that region locking is evil is for Wii owners to refuse to buy the next Nintendo console if it is region locked … and no Nintendo fanboy is actually going to do that, they would prefer to buy the new console and get screwed by Nintendo for the privilege. (Anyone remember the early reports from within Nintendo that the Wii, then codenamed “Revolution”, was going to have region-free first-party releases … I do, it helped influence my decision to buy one. Later, this turned out to be false. I’m not sure if Nintendo backflipped on this, or if it was an inaccurate report, but either way it sucks to ultimately have the Wii region-locked.)

I really hope something comes of this, but I doubt it. Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands together are still only a small market compared with other regions, and past history shows that Nintendo’s primary objective is to make big $$$ for it’s shareholders … the customer comes second. Good luck Aaron, you’ll need it.

If you want to Digg this story, don’t submit my post to Digg, Digg this.

1. Test your site in Opera 9. The Internet Channel on the Wii is based on Opera 9, so testing in Opera 9 is a great start to finding potential compatibility issues. Ultimately, you really need to view the page on the Wii using a TV to check that is it legible.
2. The maximum page width is 800 pixels wide, but keeping image and CSS element widths well under this is advised (the Wii shop channel looks good, and is 608×456). This should mean that the user doesn’t have to scroll sideways or zoom out to see the layout as intended.
3. JPEG, GIF, PNG (with alpha transparency), BMP, ICO, SVG 1.1 basic, and scripted canvas are supported.
4. Only Flash 7 is supported, and most Javascript is okay (no Java or other plugins are available)
5. Opera on Wii uses only two fonts: a sans-serif font “Wii NTLG PGothic” and a monospace font called “Wii NTLG Gothic”. Keeping the font size to a minimum of 14 – 16px should ensure that the fonts are legible on a TV without requiring the user to zoom in.

I was planning on customising a Wordpress template to detect if the browser has the User-Agent for the Wii Opera browser (Opera/9.00 (Nintendo Wii; U; ; 1038-58; Wii Shop Channel/1.0; en)), and display a custom css stylesheet accordingly. Turns out, this has already been done with the WordPress Wii Edition Plugin (WiiPress v1.3) !! I’ll probably tweak it a little in the future, but it works well enough to use “out of the box” !!

(For Firefox users who wanting to see this site using the stylesheets designed for the Wii, install the Switch User Agent Add-on and add the User-Agent “Opera/9.00 (Nintendo Wii; U; ; 1038-58; Wii Shop Channel/1.0; en)”, then reload this site).

Here are some links with general guidance to make pages display better on the Wii:

• Making Wii-friendly Pages (opera.com)
• WordPress Wii Edition Plugin (WiiPress v1.3)
• Web design guide for Opera Browser on Wii
• Is your site ready for Wii ?
• Wii press kit images … nice graphics for Wii-based themes (like the theme of this blog, for instance).