Let me just start this post by saying that I am a fanboy by no means... but I do have a slight bias for Nintendo products. I feel that this is just something that comes with being 24 and having been raised on the NES, Gameboy, and SNES. A lot of the good memories of my formative years were courtesy of Nintendo, so I am a little biased.



That being said, yesterday my g/f picked up her wii-mote to play the new Harvest Moon on the Wii. She managed to turn the Wii on with the wii-mote, but couldn't do anything else. There were no little blue lights coming on at the bottom of the wii-mote, and no pointer. Assuming the batteries were dead, she replaced them with fresh batteries. Again though, she got no response from the wii-mote. I told her that she could use my controller, and that I'd call Nintendo's customer service to get this fixed. I had no worries and, in fact, had nothing but great expectations (see wat I did thar? With the image?) for the service I was about to get, based on other peoples' experiences I'd read about here on Destructoid.



So I called Nintendo's customer support, and after letting the system know that I'm not a complete idiot, (yes the wii is plugged in, and yes the sensor bar is working] I was connected with a Nintendo customer service rep and I explained the issue to him. He had me go pick up the second wii-mote and try to sync it. When I picked up the wii-mote, it was HOT! I took the battery cover off and tried syncing the controller that wasn't on. I told him that this didn't work, and that the batteries and the wii-mote were both pretty hot. He said that it appears that the Wii Remote is failing to get power from the batteries, and that I should buy a new one. I told him that this controller was a wii-mote bought at launch, and rarely even used, and he told me that the cost of sending it back for repair would be about $50. At this point, I hung up on him. I was amazed at the lack of service provided by a company that I had always had a tremendous amount of respect for.



So now I have a $40 paperweight. Any ideas on what I should do with my worthless dead wii-mote now? I was thinking about wrapping it in a blanket, and putting it in a 100 degree oven for an hour.