That syncing feeling intensifies.
A couple of months ago I mentioned on here how I was kind of annoyed with something that happened while I was navigating the menus on my Wii. While it was annoying, I considered it a minor issue and didn’t think it would be much of a problem as long as it didn’t keep happening.
Well, it happened again, and this time it caused a bit more of a problem. Wii users need to be aware that if this happens it could really piss you off.
So to recap the issue, what happens is the remotes seem to fail to wake after a channel loads, and stop communicating with the console. The solution is a re-sync, which is only a minor task, but I discovered a situation where this is more than a minor inconvenience.
When you’re playing most games on the Wii Virtual Console, you can at any time during play hit the Home button and check your battery levels, change some settings, and if you like, back out to the Wii Menu. When you do hit Home, the game freezes, and it resumes when you press Home again. When you back out to the Wii Menu, most games create a save state, which is where you resume from next time you load the game.
It’s a great feature, especially for games that do not have a save function built in, like Super Mario Bros. But it turns out that when you leave and come back in, it erases the save state right after it loads it. So if you turn off your system at this point, the save state is lost and next time you play the game, you’re starting over.
Today, I opened Super Mario Bros and when the save state loaded, my controller didn’t wake up. After fiddling for a bit I realized I needed a re-sync as described in my “syncing feeling” article. This happens at the “health and safety notice screen,” which means I needed to power off the system. After syncing the controllers, I returned to Super Mario Bros to find myself at the beginning of the game. Hm.
Granted this is not a big deal in Super Mario Bros, but I imagine there are people playing through much more complex games like Link to the Past and are never bothering to save their game, relying on the more convenient quicksave. If you load the game and your controller doesn’t wake up, you may be SOL.
I’m working on a video of this and will post it as soon as it’s ready. I don’t have the setup to do direct-feed and I seem to be having some trouble getting my two-year-old to not drag the tripod across the room while I’m capturing.
UPDATE: Here’s the video.
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