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The Gamer's Quarter
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silentmatt
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Joined: 27 Nov 2006
Posts: 305
Location: Toronto, Ontario
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 Posted: Tue Mar 13, 2007 9:22 pm Post subject: Wii Have a Problem: Controller Issue. |
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Yeah, so. We're all desensitized to people throwing their remotes through their TVs, into their cats and ruining their dinners. No surprises there.
But.
I haven't touch the Wii in a while (a month or so at least) and today, a few friends came up and wanted to play some Tennis. We boot it up and, low-and-behold, everything is fine except one of my controllers seems to have lost it's ability to sense motion.
For example, the pointing function and button presses work fine but, boot up tennis and you are sitting there throwing the ball in the air without being able to swing at it.
And note, this is without any dramatic "remote being tossed around the room" incident. We've taken good care of the system and only put it through what I would call 'typical use'.
Anyone have a similar problem/know a fix? I guess I'll be placing a phone call to Nintendo tomorrow.
Frigging lame.
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PSN: Twitch_City ||| Wii: 8083 5371 5767 6700
"Jadis, si je me souviens bien, ma vie était un festin où s'ouvraient tous les coeurs, où tous les vins coulaient." |
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Nana Komatsu
weak sauce
Joined: 17 Jul 2006
Posts: 1293
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silentmatt
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Joined: 27 Nov 2006
Posts: 305
Location: Toronto, Ontario
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| Posted: Tue Mar 13, 2007 9:52 pm Post subject: |
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First thing I tried.
Brand new batteries.
No dice.
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PSN: Twitch_City ||| Wii: 8083 5371 5767 6700
"Jadis, si je me souviens bien, ma vie était un festin où s'ouvraient tous les coeurs, où tous les vins coulaient." |
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Ethoscapade
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Joined: 30 Oct 2005
Posts: 276
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| Posted: Tue Mar 13, 2007 9:59 pm Post subject: |
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i hadn't used mine in a couple months and it wouldn't connect to the internet for a solid couple hours then it began functioning normally again.
QA has gone out the fucking window. |
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Mister Toups
Hates your favorite videogame
Joined: 26 Jan 2005
Posts: 1693
Location: Lafayette, LA
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| Posted: Tue Mar 13, 2007 11:16 pm Post subject: |
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Have you tried spanking the controller?
Apparently motion sensing problems can be fixed by turning the remote upside down and giving it a good whack or two. Be sure the controller isn't on when you do this.
And yes, if you look, this tip is on Nintendo's official website.
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Scratchmonkey
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Joined: 02 Mar 2005
Posts: 1439
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| Posted: Tue Mar 13, 2007 11:58 pm Post subject: |
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| Ethoscapade wrote: | | QA has gone out the fucking window. |
Speaking on behalf of videogame-related QA departments everywhere, I find it extremely unlikely that QA did find and/or fully document this problem.
I do find it interesting that every time a bug, hardware or software, is discovered, it is always assumed that it is the incompetence of the relevant QA department that is responsible, rather than the possibility of upper management deciding that fixing said issue is not a priority in the face of trying to get said hardware or software within their scheduled release window.
I guess that believing that mistakes like this occur because somebody was asleep at the wheel instead of them being consequences of a concious decision is to be expected given modern brand marketing (I believe dhex had a cute name for it), especially in the case of videogames.
As for why these issues are becoming more prevalent, I think there's two main reasons:
a) As dhex brought up elsewhere, the hardware is becoming far more complicated than it used to be. All of the modern consoles have multiple mechanical devices that could have issues, not to mention that the internal software is far more complex than it used to be. That "clearing the cache" is part of console troubleshooting is a sign of how far things have come.
b) Companies are under a lot more pressure to deliver their releases on time. Far more people are interested in the "news" portion of the industry, such that delays have far more impact than they used to. So, delays lead to bad publicity, missing your PR and advertising window (which could add up to thousands pretty quickly), screwing up your schedule with your publisher/company that makes the console you're develping for and possibly causing issues with stockholders if you're publicly traded. Plus, making these games is a far more complex task than it used to be, so it's possible that one issue could concievably take weeks or more to get addressed. In these sorts of situations, it's not really that surprising that companies would be willing to let bugs go, especially if they have a fairly low rate of reproduction. PC games these days are generally released with a gigantic amount of bugs. Is this because the QA teams for companies that make PC games suck? No, it's because these companies need to make money and they're basically forced to release an unfinished product (the only exception I can think of is Blizzard, who has enough money that they can afford to hold onto a game until they're good and ready).
That's not to say that bugs don't get found. Generally, these aren't issues like "the controller fails to respond", though. Something like that, where I would expect Nintendo to have a very large internal QA department, would be found eventually, either by people stress-testing the hardware or in the process of normal software QA on any number of internal titles. It's likely that they decided that since it didn't happen that often and/or there was a workaround (such as the "spanking"), that it wasn't worth risking a delay of the Wii launch and instead is something that could be potentially fixed in a second hardware revision. |
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Nana Komatsu
weak sauce
Joined: 17 Jul 2006
Posts: 1293
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Mister Toups
Hates your favorite videogame
Joined: 26 Jan 2005
Posts: 1693
Location: Lafayette, LA
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| Posted: Wed Mar 14, 2007 3:53 am Post subject: |
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| Quote: |
b) Companies are under a lot more pressure to deliver their releases on time. Far more people are interested in the "news" portion of the industry, such that delays have far more impact than they used to. So, delays lead to bad publicity, missing your PR and advertising window (which could add up to thousands pretty quickly), screwing up your schedule with your publisher/company that makes the console you're develping for and possibly causing issues with stockholders if you're publicly traded. Plus, making these games is a far more complex task than it used to be, so it's possible that one issue could concievably take weeks or more to get addressed. In these sorts of situations, it's not really that surprising that companies would be willing to let bugs go, especially if they have a fairly low rate of reproduction. PC games these days are generally released with a gigantic amount of bugs. Is this because the QA teams for companies that make PC games suck? No, it's because these companies need to make money and they're basically forced to release an unfinished product (the only exception I can think of is Blizzard, who has enough money that they can afford to hold onto a game until they're good and ready).
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This is true, but an interesting (and hilarious exception) is Morrowind, which had absolutely no bug testing to speak of.
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silentmatt
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Joined: 27 Nov 2006
Posts: 305
Location: Toronto, Ontario
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| Posted: Wed Mar 14, 2007 5:47 am Post subject: |
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Who would have thought a spanking would do it so much good?
It is working perfectly again. Sweet!
Thanks guys. You are lifesavers - I really didn't want to wait around on hold with Nintendo all morning.
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PSN: Twitch_City ||| Wii: 8083 5371 5767 6700
"Jadis, si je me souviens bien, ma vie était un festin où s'ouvraient tous les coeurs, où tous les vins coulaient." |
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aerisdead
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Joined: 03 Dec 2006
Posts: 254
Location: Toronto, Canada
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| Posted: Wed Mar 14, 2007 7:05 am Post subject: |
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| Mister Toups wrote: | | This is true, but an interesting (and hilarious exception) is Morrowind, which had absolutely no bug testing to speak of. |
Are you being facetious?
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Shapermc
Hot Sake!
Joined: 14 Oct 2004
Posts: 6279
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| Posted: Wed Mar 14, 2007 7:58 am Post subject: |
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| silentmatt wrote: | | Who would have thought a spanking would do it so much good? |
This is a loaded question isn't it?
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932
"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!" |
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dhex
Breeder
Joined: 13 Dec 2004
Posts: 6319
Location: brooklyn, Nev Yiork
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| Posted: Wed Mar 14, 2007 8:15 am Post subject: |
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"modern brand marketing (I believe dhex had a cute name for it)"
lovemarks? i stole that from that fucking piece of shit kevin roberts.
anyway, yeah, to some degree this plays a role, as some companies can do no evil and others no good, but no matter what someone is always in control. i can only presume this reaction shows up so much because the reactor (ZOMG CRITICAL MASS) has never been a part of an institution or seen how decisions are made in medium to large organizations - i.e. a careworn patchwork of stupidity, desperation and barely sublimated homoerotic violence.
but some of it, shit maybe a lot of it, is just complexity. you cannot account for every permutation, ever user action, every driver interaction, the weather, etc. you can try - i'm sure nintendo had a tester or two who kept breaking the strap, but they probably said "dude, stop being such a jackass" or it only showed up a few days after the strap design was finalized. as such, they forgot or ignored rule #2 - your audience is an army of zombie jackasses who want any excuse to hate you and fuck your wife.
i mean, as much as i have grown to hate apple's craptacular shoddiness, i don't really believe they make their ipods flimsy and suckwaddish because they expect their army of sheep to go out and baaaaaaaaaa baaaaa buy new reiterations every 9 to 14 months, but because we're stuffing a whole bunch of shit into a very small space and then putting them in backpacks (i took care of mine, hence the righteous rage) and giving them to teenagers and people who like incubus.
we're doing things that 10 years ago seemed like crazy dreams of sillitude, or at least a few years ahead of time. the entire flash memory market was revolutionized and now people regularly carry a hard drive the size of an eraser around their necks that has, on average, 10x the amount of storage space (and probably 4x the access speed) of the hard drive in my desktop in 1994.
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Scratchmonkey
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Joined: 02 Mar 2005
Posts: 1439
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| Posted: Wed Mar 14, 2007 1:45 pm Post subject: |
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| aerisdead wrote: | | Mister Toups wrote: | | This is true, but an interesting (and hilarious exception) is Morrowind, which had absolutely no bug testing to speak of. |
Are you being facetious? |
Yeah, I'll second this. I happen to know that Bethesda has a pretty big QA department and there's absolutely no way a game gets even close to a commercial release without months of QA. It may be that they decided to ship the game with plenty of bugs still unaddressed; however, I find it completely unbelievable that there was no testing, that simply isn't possible. |
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Mister Toups
Hates your favorite videogame
Joined: 26 Jan 2005
Posts: 1693
Location: Lafayette, LA
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| Posted: Wed Mar 14, 2007 2:56 pm Post subject: |
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| Scratchmonkey wrote: | | aerisdead wrote: | | Mister Toups wrote: | | This is true, but an interesting (and hilarious exception) is Morrowind, which had absolutely no bug testing to speak of. |
Are you being facetious? |
Yeah, I'll second this. I happen to know that Bethesda has a pretty big QA department and there's absolutely no way a game gets even close to a commercial release without months of QA. It may be that they decided to ship the game with plenty of bugs still unaddressed; however, I find it completely unbelievable that there was no testing, that simply isn't possible. |
I'm serious. At least that's what the guy from Bethesda's QA department told me at E3 last year. He said they just didn't have a QA department. He said there was no bug testing.
I guess could have been lying, but I don't see what reason he'd have for that.
It's not that hard to believe. I mean, have you played Morrowind unpatched?
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Scratchmonkey
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Joined: 02 Mar 2005
Posts: 1439
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| Posted: Wed Mar 14, 2007 3:05 pm Post subject: |
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| Mister Toups wrote: | I'm serious. At least that's what the guy from Bethesda's QA department told me at E3 last year. He said they just didn't have a QA department. He said there was no bug testing.
I guess could have been lying, but I don't see what reason he'd have for that.
It's not that hard to believe. I mean, have you played Morrowind unpatched? |
Not having a QA department I could probably believe, as many small PC companies have people multi-task on anything and everything (at one company I worked at, I was tech support/QA/technica writer); however, they couldn't have gotten to market without some bug-testing.
Yes, Morrowind was hella buggy; it also worked, basically. You don't get a game, especially a PC game, to work unless somebody somewhere is doing some testing. Maybe it wasn't a separate department, maybe it wasn't very formal, I can assure you that it was happening. And yes, it is "that hard" to believe.
Either that or dude was testing the limits of your gullibility.
EDITED TO ADD:
Credits on Morrowind include:
Quality Assurance Lead Michael Fridley
So, there aren't any other credited testers, so maybe what dude meant when he was talking to you that this guy and the programmers were doing basically all the serious stuff by themselves, which is pretty insane and that there was probably some beta testing going on later in the project.
In any case, there's at least one person credited for QA and from experience working on games, there had to have been some sort of testing taking place, so I think the idea that Morrowind could have possibly made it to gold status without bug testing is bunk. |
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Mister Toups
Hates your favorite videogame
Joined: 26 Jan 2005
Posts: 1693
Location: Lafayette, LA
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| Posted: Wed Mar 14, 2007 3:14 pm Post subject: |
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But it makes for such a good story :(
edit: that was your 666th post scratchmonkey!
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dizzyjosh
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Joined: 20 Jun 2006
Posts: 64
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| Posted: Wed Mar 14, 2007 4:01 pm Post subject: |
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there was QA on it. it may have come in late, but it was there.
FACT: QA (as well it's more common but less referred-to brother, QC) more or less works on statistical principles-- you run a small sample that hopefully represents your players through the game enough times that you can say "it probably works well enough to be completable for most players".
THUS: stuff will always break, and there's always a chance you'll get the remote that blows up or breaks on yr drivers or screws the pooch or whathaveyou. if it doesn't happen enough and doesn't make your monitor explode, it'll pass. in a game i once did QC for, we had to cut support for a line of soundblaster drivers because we were triggering a bug in the creative firmware that would bluescreen the PC anytime the player called a certain attack command.
notice: we didn't fix anything, we didn't remove the attack-- we cut "support".
addendum: best bug i have gotten so far in my life:
"The world is empty if you do things out of order"
they didn't even tell me which level it was. |
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