One of the many shortsighted decisions Nintendo made at the Wii launch was making the controllers run on AA batteries. A pair of batteries last long enough for around 24 hours of gaming time. This is not a particularly short time, but the fact that we found ourselves chucking out a pair of batteries as often as every week or so was a little disconcerting. It wasn’t long before Nyko saw this as an opportunity and provided the Charge Station Wii, which is a docking station with replacement rechargable cells for a pair of Wii Remotes. It wasn’t perfect, with some issues making a connection to the batteries for charging and some other issues that eventually worked out, but when I reviewed it back in June 2007, I recommended it.

Now that it’s about two years old, it’s driving me crazy. While it makes a connection to the charger quickly and easily, it won’t fully charge the batteries. I will frequently remove the controllers from the charger only to find that the “charged” light is lying to me. There will only be 1/4 to 1/2 charge in the battery. Today was the final straw. I own three Wii Remotes, and while two of them were in the charger, none of them had enough of a charge for me to finish a round of Punch-Out!!. I’m guessing what’s happened is “memory effect,” where batteries that have been recharged many times will lose the ability to hold a full charge. Weren’t we supposed to be past that technological limitation years ago?

Looks like I’m going back to AAs.