GregHowley.com

For a long, long time now, I've been having trouble with the wifi on my Wii. I'd had DHCP turned off for a while, and had all the IP addresses in the house set manually, with the HOSTS files set up all nice so that the names would be recognised. Eight different manually-configured local IP addresses for the router, my machine, Linda's machine, the server, two guest machines, the Nintendo DS, and the Wii. When I recently changed the profiles on Linda's laptop and made her stop using the "administrator" account, I turned DHCP back on. Through all this, I'd had serious connectivity issues with the Wii.

Now, I know next to nothing about networking. Some might say "just enough to be dangerous". When I set up the wireless router and our file server, I had PMD tell me a bit about TCP/IP and explain to me what exactly DHCP was. And so I got the majority of the wireless devices in the house functioning adequately.

But although the Wii was able to download updates, although I was able to send and receive Wii-mail, and although the weather and news channels worked great, the Wii Shop and Browser were extremely flaky. I'd connected to the internet via the Wii browser before, but now the progress bar was never even starting. And the Wii Shop was always spitting out some error. So I spent a lot of time on WiiError.com, and tried a number of things, including changing the channel on my router and manually configuring settings on the Wii. Nothing worked.

Last night, I was just about fed up with it. After the 114th failed attempt to connect to the Wii Shop channel, I decided to pop into the Everybody Votes channel. That's when my wiimote stopped working. That was a huge pain. After a lot of googling, this page helped, but it was this page that gave me my solution: remove the batteries for 2-3 minutes. Seeing that I've got an orange silicone sleeve on my primary wiimote, accessing the battery compartment was an annoyance, but it worked.

It was the googling about syncing the remote that got me to finally spend the time researching my WiFi woes. After a lot more googling, I found a page that advised me to turn DMZ off. I had no idea what DMZ is. My notions of what it is are still a bit fuzzy - something like port forwarding, I believe. But unchecking the DMZ item in my router's control panel seemed to solve all my problems.

This morning, before I left for work, I purchased 2000 Wii points ($20) and started downloading Ocarina of Time. But browsing quickly through the Wii shop items brought me to a realization. The 12 hotdogs, 8 buns realization.

I'm going to leave Sony out of this discussion, because I don't know how their download service works, and I probably won't have any interest in a PS3 for well over a year, but let's look at Nintendo and Microsoft.

When using the Wii, you buy Wii points to purchase and download content from the Wii Shop. When using a XBox 360, you buy Microsoft points to purchase and download content from XBox Live Arcade. Wii points are simple. A penny per point. 2000 points equals Twenty dollars. Microsoft points are less simple: you get eighty points per dollar. $12.50 gets you 1000 points. Now, I've heard arguments as to why Microsoft points are a good system, but personally, I just find them annoying. But that's okay since I don't now nor have I ever owned a XBox.

So this morning, I purchased 2000 Wii points, and spent 1000. Now, I'm not sure exactly what I'm going to spend my additional 1000 points on, but I'll probably get Super Castlevania IV or Gunstar Heroes, which are both 800 points. You see my problem? 12 hotdogs, but only 8 buns. I'm left with 200 points, which I can't spend on anything. And that of course, acts as an incentive for me to buy more. Grr. Stupid marketing.

But there is more I'm interested in. When PunchOut is released, I'll be buying that, and if they ever put out Double Dragon 2 or Castlevania 3, I'm all over that.

Interestingly, Nintendo lists Hogan's Alley and Duck Hunt as upcoming Virtual Console games. Those were NES games played with the light gun. Nintendo showed their zapper at E3 2006, but we've heard no news about it since. And it seems like it'd be essential to a game like Hogan's Alley. The zapper is cool because in addition to light gun functionality, which is significantly different from the behavior of the Wiimote for targeting, the zapper has a thumbstick at the back, right about where your thumb would rest.

Looks like the zapper is actually a holder for the Wiimote, so I'm assuming you could still plug the nunchuk in. If this is so, I can imagine a fantastic shooter mechanic: The nunchuk analog stick in your left hand controls movement as per WASD keys on a PC, the thumbstick on the zapper acts like the mouse on the PC does, letting you look up, down, and side-to-side. And pointing the zapper at the screen lets you target. No telling how that would feel, but being able to target independantly of screen movement would offer flexibility even better than PC shooters, and potentially be an even better scheme than mouse-and-keyboard. Of course, the Wii's Vicious Engine is looking pretty good too.

So that's the end of my ramblings for the day. If you're still reading, you get the Blog of Wonder Gold Star.