gwax's rumblings

One of my house­mates got a Nintendo Wii and, I have to tell you folks, it really is the best thing to hap­pen to video games in ages. I’ve been play­ing a lot of Wii Sports and Zelda: Twilight Princess, both of which are phe­nom­e­nal games that I rec­om­mend; I also highly rec­om­mend Excite Truck, which takes great advan­tage of the Wiimote (con­troller). I haven’t had this much fun play­ing video games in a very long time and, con­sid­er­ing how much I like video games, I’m say­ing a lot here. Twilight Princess is so much fun that I’ve logged about 34 hours within the past week and I haven’t even been side-questing very much.

As much as I love the Wii, my point in this post is not to sing the praises of the Wii but to warn you of the dan­gers and sug­gest pos­si­ble pre­ven­ta­tive mea­sures. There have been a num­ber of sto­ries prop­a­gat­ing their way about the inter­net about peo­ple throw­ing their Wiimotes into win­dows, tele­vi­sions and other peo­ple. Nintendo’s response to hear­ing the peo­ple have been throw­ing con­trollers into tele­vi­sions and such has basi­cally been to tell peo­ple to hold on the con­trollers. Prior to yes­ter­day, I would have, and did, scoff at those idiots that broke their crap but that would have been before yes­ter­day. Yesterday, I was play­ing Wii Sports bowl­ing with a few of my friends; we were using one Wiimote between the four of us and since the tran­si­tions were fairly rapid, we weren’t both­er­ing to use the wrist strap (big mis­take). One of the house­mates I was play­ing with *cough*Paddy*cough* lost con­trol of the Wiimote and threw it into our won­der­ful 51″, rear-projection HDTV. The front sur­face of our TV was 0.093″ PMMA (a.k.a. Acrylic or Plexiglas), which is a fairly brit­tle and not very tough mate­r­ial. Needless to say, a Wiimote thrown fairly hard at a thin sheet of PMMA results in a pretty big crack (see image). A bro­ken HDTV is a very sad thing, espe­cially when it’s your TV.

So there we were with a cracked TV so, clearly, the thing to do was pull it apart and fix it. It took me a while to get the thing apart but even­tu­ally we had TV bits all over the liv­ing room floor and I’d got­ten that PMMA screen out. Having pulled the PMMA out at about 2am and hav­ing no replace­ment on hand, the parts were left sprawled out in our liv­ing room. First thing (1:30pm) today, I went off to Home Depot with the respon­si­ble party and another so as to obtain a nice big sheet of 0.093″ Polycarbonate (a.k.a. Lexan), which is about three times as expen­sive and about thirty times as strong (impact strength) as PMMA. After a bit of time cut­ting the sheet of Polycarbonate down, a bit more time putting the Polycarbonate in the screen and a bit more time reassem­bling the TV, we have a func­tional 51″ HDTV. Additionally, Polycarbonate is what’s used for bul­let­proof glass so hope­fully that’ll make it Wiiproof too.

So, the morals of this post are: 1) make sure that you always use the wrist strap, and 2) replace your screen with Polycarbonate or put a sheet of Polycarbonate in front of your TV.