Some of my regular readers (yes, both of you) may remember that I was given some coloured Wii Remote ‘condoms’ as a gift, on the same day that Nintendo announced they were going to ship free Wii Remote jackets. I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to use my new coloured covers at the same time as the official protective covers from Nintendo.
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 ?
Edmund McMillen of Cryptic Sea has documented the early stages of the quest to get his award winning independant game, Gish, onto WiiWare. Sounds like Reggie of Nintendo America was positive about the idea, but understandably, is a hard guy to schedule a phone meeting with.
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.
Aaron Davies is on a crusade. As a loyal Nintendo Wii fan, he is sick an tired of the Australian, New Zealand and and Pacific regions (ie “PAL” format) getting consistently screwed with slow release dates for first-party Nintendo games. Aaron’s report covering release dates of the top 8 rated games (pdf) clearly shows that when it comes the third party releases, the lag time between the English language release in North America and Australia is much shorter than games produced ‘in house’ by Nintendo. Nintendo ‘in house’ titles tend to be released several months later in Australia, while third party titles are usually available in Australia less than a month after the US release. Read the rest of this entry »
Here are some general guidelines which should keep in mind to ensure your WordPress temples display properly in the Opera browser on the Nintendo Wii. Much of this applies to any web page designed for the Wii Internet Channel.
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.
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.
JPEG, GIF, PNG (with alpha transparency), BMP, ICO, SVG 1.1 basic, and scripted canvas are supported.
Only Flash 7 is supported, and most Javascript is okay (no Java or other plugins are available)
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:
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.
