Technomaly » Wii

Black Wii Coming May 9

J. Matthew Zoss — Wed, 05 May 2010 18:56:33 +0000

Do you have a Wii? You do, huh? Well, do you have a black one? No? Better get on that. Nintendo’s living room-dominating Wii will be available in black starting May 9. The new bundle will be priced at $200, the same price as the current white Wii. However, the new edition will come with both Wii Sports and Wii Sports Resort, as well as a Wii Remote with the Wii Motion Plus add-on and Nunchuck. If you’re one of the nine people who doesn’t yet have a Wii, this is the bundle we’d recommend.

Wii Balance Board Good For Something: Helps Stroke Victims With Balance

J. Matthew Zoss — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 14:00:50 +0000

If you have a Wii balance board, chances are that you have a Wii balance board that’s not being used for much. Why not donate it to science? Ross Clark of the University of Melbourne, Australia has discovered a use for the hunks of plastic: measuring the center of pressure for people relearning how to stand, such as stroke victims.

By taking the board apart to tap its strain gauges and accelerometer for their raw data, Clark found “an an extremely impressive strain gauge set-up.” Considering that laboratory-grade “force platforms” cost around £11,000, the researcher was obviously quite excited to find an equally effective piece of equipment that can be bought for around on $70 bucks on Craigslist. So pitch in, donate your dusty, unused balance board to science today!

Source: New Scientist

Image Source: Nintendo

Mega Man’s Newest Enemy: Illiteracy Man!

Geoffrey Golden — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 16:00:30 +0000

Are you skilled at collecting E-Tanks and blasting evil robots, but not so skilled at reading English? Forget adult learning schools. Let Mega Man and the Master Robots teach you the ABC’s in this funny children’s book parody from Destructoid. A is for Air Man, B is for Bomb Man, C is for Could This BE Any More Awesome Man? The rhymes are funny, the illustrations are adorable… I wish this was how I learned the alphabet.

Oh, and remember everybody, T is for Ten. As in Mega Man 10, coming to all consoles March of this year. In your quest to defeat Dr. Wiley, you will kill many, many brain cells. (Perhaps you’ll even unlearn your ABCs.)

Netflix Comes to Nintendo Wii

J. Matthew Zoss — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 15:58:11 +0000

Image credit: Gadgetreview.com

There’s no question that Nintendo’s Wii console is one of the hottest tech items of the last several years. But I think it’s fair to say that a huge percentage of the consoles are doing little more than gathering dust right now. Fortunately, that little white box hooked up to your TV is about to get more useful. Like the Xbox 360 and the PS3 before it, the Wii will soon add Netflix streaming to its functionality.

For those of you without a Netflix account, the service offers online streaming videos in addition to mailed DVDs. These movie can be viewed on your computer or your television if you have a streaming-capable device hooked up. When the service is added to Wii consoles in the spring, it will require that a special Netflix streaming disc be inserted into the Wii drive and that the user has a valid Netflix account. Because the Wii is the only one of the three current game consoles that doesn’t support HD, streamed videos will be standard definition only. Still, even with a few limitations, anything that adds new functionality to the Wii will just help you justify the purchase to your spouse, who told you that you didn’t really need that thing in the first place.

Via New York Times.

Create Digital Graffiti With WiiSpray

J. Matthew Zoss — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 19:39:58 +0000

I’m a huge game, but I spend very little time with the Wii. With a few exceptions, I just don’t think most of the games released for it are very interesting. On the other hand, the Wii has produced a lot of interesting experiments that aren’t (yet) possible on other gaming platforms. The latest one to catch my eye is WiiSpray, the graffiti program created by German students Martin Lihs and Frank Matuse. By plugging the Wii Remote into a spraycan-shaped peripheral, users can create virtual tagging projects that can be saved and re-edited later. It’s pretty cool stuff, as you can see in the videos below. It would be hard to call this a legitimate video game, rather an interactive art program. I’d love to give it a try, but I’m fairly confident that will never happen. The Wii software market has been softening up for months now, so an experimental program like this is going to have a hard time attracting a publisher.

Wii Spray Stencil – Beta from Martin Lihs on Vimeo.