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Sony, Nintendo Announce 'Fixes' For Their Consoles
Gamasutra reports that both Nintendo and Sony still have a few kinks to work out from their newly launched systems. It may seem funny to an onlooker, but the spectacular Wii strap blowouts are being taken very seriously by Nintendo. People are evidently 'even more excited' by playing the little white console than the company anticipated, and they're investigating the possibility that the straps aren't strong enough. Meanwhile, Sony has updated the PS3's firmware to 1.30 in an effort to take care of the much-complained-about resolution scaling issues. Ars Technica (and several other sites) are saying that the fix doesn't really do anything, despite Sony's reassurances. From that article: "The priority of resolutions has been changed, putting 1080i over 720p. So if you prefer 720p as a resolution, be sure to uncheck 1080i as a possible resolution on your television, or else games that support both resolutions will automatically display at 1080i. Of course, if you uncheck 1080i as a resolution, your Blu-ray movies will display at 480p. So you'll have to just manually switch the resolution yourself depending on what you're doing ... If you have a 720p set, not only has Sony not fixed the scaling issues, they've made the process of playing games and watching movies less user friendly. Sony really wants you to upgrade into a 1080p set, and they seem to want to punish you if you don't have one."
If you look at a wiimote from the more recent batches (especialy if its one that got sent by nintendo because of a defect or another, as a replacement), and compare the straps, the newer wiimotes have much, much better straps. So its already fixed in the newer batches, as far as I can tell.
If you're honestly worried about the strap breaking on your Wiimote, check out this quick how-to on flickr. Just use some heavy duty fly fishing line to reinforce it.
My work here is dung.
There's a warning screen before each game to tightly grip the Wiimote. I wouldn't blame Nintendo for my inability to grip an object. On a related note, society on the whole is far to sue happy and I'm of the opinion that they should institute a mandatory penalty for bringing frivolous law suits.
I was hoping this there would be news of a Wii system update, perhaps to allow the Classic Controller to be used with Gamecube games on the Wii. As it is, you have to use a Gamecube controller. The Classic has all the buttons you would need, even the analog-style L and R triggers, but for some reason, it is not set up that way. I really don't want to buy a Wavebird, and I really REALLY don't want an ugly dongle sticking out of the top of my nice new Wii.