I finally got a Nintendo Wii this weekend. My parents had actually given me money to buy one for Christmas because they weren’t able to find one anywhere. Ever since Christmas, I’ve been checking around the local stores in my area whenever I was out shopping. It only took me about half a year to find one. I must admit that part of the problem is that I haven’t been extremely proactive in my hunting. I haven’t had time to check with a bunch of stores and find out when the newest shipment was coming, etc.

I had really positive first impressions of the Nintendo Wii. Very fun to play and the controls were mostly intuitive. Once I practiced playing Wii Sports for awhile I decided to give Zelda a try because I knew Zelda’s controls would be more complicated. They were, but still pretty easy to learn. I must admit that I’m a horrible shot with the sling shot though.

Unfortunately, I haven’t had a chance to improve my aim because my controller quit working today It started giving some trouble last night while I was playing Zelda. The pointer quit working, but the rest of the controller functioned as it should. I thought it might be the batteries even though I had just put some new ones in. That didn’t help so I turned the system off for a while and then retried and all was working.

However, before long I lost the pointer again. I moved the batteries around some more thinking I had a bad connection and then everything seemed fine. After Church today I played Wii sports without any problems. I decided to switch to Zelda and it seemed like everything was working, but that didn’t last. This time, nothing I did would fix the Wii remote.

I finally broke down and called Nintendo’s customer support. Surprisingly, I didn’t have to wait on the line very long and talked to a very friendly, helpful customer service representative. She walked me through several steps such as checking the sensor bar cable for kinks and knots, checking connections, doing a hard reset of the system and a then syncing the Wii remote. However, none of those steps fixed the remote.

She then asked if the system would be receiving any interference. I told her the only thing I had was wireless Internet (Access Point in another room) and the cell phone I was talking to her on. She had me put her on hold and leave the cell phone in another room while re-syncing the Wii remote. Unfortunately, this didn’t work either. I tried re-syncing the controller but that didn’t do any good either.

My Wii remote respond at all after the hard reset. The batter indicator doesn’t even work. It’s quite odd, really.

Nintendo is shipping a new Wii remote to me this week for free since my system is still under warranty (by the way, if you register your system you get an extra 3 months added to the default 12 month warranty). Now, I just have to wait patiently for a few days until the new controller arrives. I just hope this fixes my problems. It’s going to be hard having a brand new system setting in my living room and knowing I want get to play it for a few days.

I’m hoping this is just a freak accident with my Wii. I haven’t heard of anyone else having the same problem so may I just got a bad controller. I don’t know. I have been very pleased with Nintendo’s customer service although I wish I didn’t have to use it. At least I got the play on the Wii for a couple of days before the controller stopped working.