A broken TV tastes like eating crow

I've been meaning to write a post about all the stupid articles and references to a couple people that have tossed their Wii controllers so hard it broke their television. I've been playing about 30 minutes a day for the past week and having a controller slip out of your hand just seemed ridiculous. I was so confident in this assertion that I took the leash out of the remote when I first set it up. I noticed a bunch of blogs linking to the broken TV stories and the press seemed to glom onto it because it's a funny new angle they can deflate the Wii hype with. You'd have to be a total spazz to not only need the leash but also break it, and then break your TV too.

Blogs and newspapers both love to do this: find a silly outlier story to discredit/attack/mock a new trend. The "you'll hurt each other playing a Wii" and "you'll break your TV!" stories definitely fill the bill and allow a pundit or blogger to scoff at anything interesting, new, or innovative in something like the Wii and just make jokes about it. I'd also say jokes about the Zune coming in brown or Microsoft employees calling file transfers "squirting" is doing the same thing to the Zune: overshadowing the actual innovative feature that lets you share songs with random people nearby (I'll never own a Zune but I wish my iPods could do that).

Anyway, this is just a long way of saying last night I was playing the training part of the Sports disc, where you can bowl with up to 96 pins. You have to throw the ball as hard as you can, and while doing this the controller slid clear out of my hand. It banked off the fireplace in front of me with so much force that it bounced directly up into the ceiling where it hit hard and bounced back down. It missed the TV above the fireplace by a couple of inches.

So I guess the moral of the story is you should really use those little leash things and I'm a bigger spazz than I thought.