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   There have been several weird stories about the Wii in the past few days, and I'd like to take a moment to share some of them with you. The craziest one, I believe, is about a guy playing Wii games on a 1.5 inch TV - just don't ask me where you can get such a diminutive display! You can check out a couple of videos showing just this on YouTube, here and here. I have no idea how he can target anything at all with the Wiimote on such a tiny screen, but it sure looks cute as hell. And best of all, it's highly unlikely to break your TV, should the Wiimote fly out of your sweaty palm.

   Next, comes a story of Wii, PC and Half-Life 2. We've known about the ability to use the Wii remote on the PC for a while, but to see it used with such ease in a game like Half-Life 2, really is a sight to behold. All you need is a Bluetooth adaptor, a Windows PC, and a lot of spare time. Half-Life 2 - or shooters in general - may not be the best choice for such a controller, but I could think of a PC game or two that would benefit from an extra input option for Nintendo's Wii remote. I'm not holding my breath, though, and I suggest neither do you.

   On a related note, just now I was pointed over to a Slashdot story about DarwiinRemote - a Wiimote frontend for Apple's OSX. Shortly put, it's "a tiny piece of software which reads data from and sends data to Nintendo Wii Remote. It detects all 3 axis sensors, all buttons (except power)". There are more useful links there, if you're into Apple.

   On a less inspiring note, however, I also find it pretty weird that some Virtual Console games on the Wii have black borders in PAL territories! CVG has the story on this one, and they also have an incriminating screenshot with the classic Sonic the Hedgehog, sporting a pair of ugly black borders along the top and bottom of the screen. But even more worrying, they say, is that the PAL version of the game runs significantly slower than the US equivalent. Wasn't this a problem in early consoles from like... 20 years ago? Surely, they should have figured it out by now!

   And finally, after all the domestic accidents involving sweaty hands, broken straps and flying Wiimotes, Nintendo decided to investigate the problem for themselves. They are also urging us to calm down and not get too excited while playing with our Wiis (but then, what's the point, I dare ask!). In another CVG story, Shigeru Miyamoto is quoted as saying: "We are encouraging people to understand that you really don't have to be so excited but rather you need to understand the control and then you're going to be the best player. We are looking into the situation to see if there are additional methods to encourage people to kind of calm down so they would never throw away the controller itself."    And with that, I bid you farewell for the night, and go back to counting down for tomorrow's European launch...