A compact box that's already inexpensive to produce (and continuously remains in greater demand than supply can keep up with) may not cry out for revision, but there are a few bits that can be nipped and tucked to enhance the appeal and value of the Wii. This week Revolutionary goes Revisionary.

The first thing on the operating table is the internal storage. We've written countless times of the hassles in swapping downloaded games and channels to and from an SD card, so naturally, that's something we'd like to see addressed. 2GB is a nice round number which shouldn't add more than a few cents to the bill of materials for the Wii. With the price of flash memory falling at such an alarming rate, we'd expect that, if any part of the Wii were to be technically altered during this generation, it would be the integrated flash memory. Nintendo President Satoru Iwata has confirmed that the storage limitations are something they are looking into, so perhaps this will be the solution for new console buyers.

Many of you contended that Nintendo could resolve the problem by simply "unlocking" the SD card slot and allowing us to play games and downloaded content directly from it. I'd argue that Nintendo wouldn't do that when it could also open up more doors to piracy, and they have another marketing prospect to capitalize on. But should they feel so generous, we'd gladly welcome being able to use the SD cards we already have in a new Wii. That includes the cards with greater than 2GB capacity that aren't supported in the current console.

Any mid-cycle Wii upgrades would have to be limited to secondary functions that wouldn't affect the playing of existing games or alienate the existing user base. We can't really expect a faster GPU and more RAM, unless they are there to facilitate new non-essential functions. We shouldn't be required to have the Wii 1.5 to play Pikmin Wii, because the 1.0 version doesn't have enough RAM. But if Wii 1.5 ships with a DVD Movie Channel, it wouldn't be wrong to include any additional hardware or software necessary for playing DVDs in the revision.

In our fantasy Wii 1.5, the front of the console would trade in clicky buttons for touch-sensitive, capacitive ones. Like on the PS3, the power button would be multifunctional. Touching the power "button" while the system is powered off or in standby mode will turn it on. Holding it while in standby mode will power it off (and disable WiiConnect24). Touching it while powered on will reset it, and holding the button will put it in standby mode. I think we can all agree that touching is good.

On the aesthetics side, a sleeker chassis is what I'd like to see. While minimalism was apparently central to the original design theme, it wouldn't take a windtunnel study to show areas where it can do with some streamlining. The flimsy Gamecube port covers should be replaced with something sturdier. If the whole case is made of slightly transparent plastic, we can still see those ports when the flap is up. And even though the front flap covering the SD card slot and sync button doesn't hold up as poorly, I just don't see a need to keep it.

Click for larger image

Like Mario shot from a cannon, we've blown the corners off this baby. Rounded edges give it a more unique profile which won't be easily mistaken for your computer's DVD burner. Okay, so I borrowed a little from Apple's design school, but the big Wii logo on the side helps promote the brand when guests are drawn in by the hypnotic blue glow of the disc slot.

And when they ask, "Does it come in black?" you can respond with a resounding "YES!" The first time we ever saw the Wii (back when it was still going by the "Revolution" codename), it was housed in a sexy black casing. In the world of home theater appliances, the brilliant white gleam of our 1.0 Wii sticks out like a sore thumb. Black just goes with everything, and Wesley Snipes says to always bet on it.

Up to this point, this has just been a wish list. What's guaranteed to happen before the end of the cycle is a reduction in price and maybe a new SKU or two. The most likely candidate for bundling in a package to sit on store shelves alongside the Wii Sports-bundled SKU is Wii Fit.

Replacing the Nunchuk and Wii Sports pack-ins with a Balance Board and Wii Fit could enhance the appeal for a new demographic. The cute Miis and perceived competitive rooting of Wii Sports may not be for everyone, so the solemnity of Wii Fit could be the Trojan horse that makes the Wii platform attractive to more of those people who are still turned off by a games machine.

If they've already dropped the price of the current SKU, ($199 is the sweet spot, but $229 may be more likely) by the time they're ready to sell this bundle, I'd estimate a Wii Fit-bundled Wii to go for $279. Otherwise, $299 would be still be a good deal. In all sincerity, if Nintendo were to release a refresh Wii that is anything like the package I've outlined above, I'd buy it in a heartbeat and give the one I've got to a friend or family member whom I'd hope could be converted into a gamer.

What types of upgrades or enhancements would it take to get you to buy another Wii? How about your friends and family members that haven't been pulled over to the light side yet? What do you feel could be done to the system to get them to part with their hard-earned jack and bring one home? Scroll down and leave a comment for discussion.

Every other week, Mike Sylvester brings you REVOLUTIONARY, a look at the wide world of Wii possibilities. We've got our hopes up for some new announcements regarding hardware at E3, not least of which is a supplemental storage device. To see why we're waiting for Nintendo to throw the storage-starved a bone, take a look at Revolutionary: Wii can has hard drive?

Every other week, Mike Sylvester brings you REVOLUTIONARY, a look at the wide world of Wii possibilities.

If you're smitten with the Virtual Console, one thing we're sure you aren't in love with is having to swap games between an SD card and your Wii's internal memory, or even worse -- deleting games to be re-downloaded later. WiiWare is on its way and it's hard to imagine My Life as a King demeaning itself to share its estate with less noble games. And certainly not with it bringing microtransactions to the royal ball. And wouldn't it be dandy if some of our multiplatform ports had somewhere to store that downloadable content that everyone is raving about on other consoles?

We want need more storage, and some of you have gathered to plead with Nintendo to sell a Wii Hard Drive. It appears that your cries just fall on deaf ears because they seem hardly driven to provide one. In this edition of Revolutionary, we'll examine why Wii can't have a hard drive.

Being a Nintendo fan means you've grown accustomed to waiting. You waited an eternity for their pioneering portable to evolve a backlit color screen. You endured an extra generation of cartridge-based gaming. And even now, you accept life in standard definition whilst holding onto a thread of belief that some day, Nintendo will go high def. So why is it that people are so willing to believe that Nintendo's on the verge of announcing a Wii Hard Drive when it's the standard choice for storage this generation? In accordance with tradition, it would have to come no earlier than next generation, if ever.

The reason why Nintendo is so profitable is because they take few risks in marketing products, and when they do go forth in delivering something new, it's after exhaustive research and calculation. A cursory analysis would show that a hard drive does not jibe with Nintendo's usual methods of operation. The two biggest marks against a hard drive are cost and fragility.

Take a look at the Xbox 360's hard drive upgrades. There's a huge difference in price between the hard drives they sell and the standard retail prices of the 20GB and 120GB hard drives that their products are based around. The difference in prices can't be entirely attributed to the enclosure that the Xbox 360 hard drives are packaged in. Microsoft wants to make a profit on the sale of peripherals, so they sell them at a higher price than it costs to market them. Nintendo would be no different, except they would not want to sell a product at such a high cost that the consumer has to call into question the value of it. Selling a 20GB hard drive at $90 is not as easy as selling Wii Fit, because we look at Wii Fit and say, "Well, it comes with a game and a controller." And it's unlikely that Nintendo would be looking to go with a 20GB hard drive, because manufacturing of drives at such low capacity is dwindling, and it's giving rise to rumors that the 20GB Xbox 360 bundled and accessory hard drives are going to be phased out and replaced with 60GB packages. If Nintendo went with that capacity, there would be higher costs and less profit.

Spinning platters and sliding read/write heads can cause a hard drive to wear out, even when data isn't being written or read from it. Flash memory, like the Wii's internal storage and the SD cards it also supports, has a finite number of reads and writes before ultimate failure, but the Wii usually copies saves and game data from the flash memory to RAM in limited accesses, instead of streaming the data as we would expect from a hard drive. We can count on the Wii's internal flash memory lasting a lot longer than the battery backups in NES cartridges, though the same might not be true of a hard drive.

Having to provide a warranty for portable hard drives, which may be easily damaged by a bump, fall, or just plain negligent treatment, would also affect the bottom line and make Nintendo resistant to marketing anything with this technology. It doesn't take much of a jolt to make the moving read/write heads grind into the spinning platters and cause an EPIC FAIL on any further attempts to access that part of the hard drive.

The Xbox 360 and PS3 are a little safer because the hard drive is attached to or installed inside the console. Shock can be distributed through the body of the whole console, and reduce the potential for damaging the drive. A USB cable tether doesn't provide much support to an external hard drive, but it might just yank the console down with it when falling off a precarious perch. Also, those systems don't have quite the reputation as our Wii for livening parties. All the mishaps that could happen from packing the hard drive for transport, or setting it up with altered judgment would have to be considered. So, why even go with a hard drive when there's a more suitable alternative?

The logical assumption is that Nintendo will follow course and just stick to flash storage. Not even in the highest densities available to consumers would it provide the "bottomless pit" of storage that a moderate capacity hard drive could, but that may be all part of their marketing strategy. Silly as we consumers are, we're more likely to buy one 8GB drive today for $59 and another a year from now than to buy that 20GB hard drive for $89, which we'd never have to upgrade again. There's added appeal in the flash drives for being small enough to poke out of a USB port with room enough for another. In contrast, even the smallest hard drives are bigger than a common flash-based thumb drive.

Why haven't they gone this route yet? Again, profit margins would probably be the primary consideration. If Nintendo waits a bit longer while production costs of flash memory continue to decrease, they can make more money selling them. All the while, demand for the product will increase as they continue to sell Virtual Console games and WiiWare.

Doesn't work in Wii, but we can dream

This generation, Nintendo has bundled a game with every major piece of hardware. Wii Play comes with a Wiimote, Link's Crossbow Training is packed in with the Zapper, Mario Kart Wii will have the Wii Wheel, and Wii Fit will introduce the Balance Board. If Nintendo were to introduce a high-capacity, re-writeable storage medium, what could they possibly develop to showcase it? Well, they could re-tread tracks laid by their stillborn project, the 64DD. We haven't heard anything about a new Mario Paint, F-Zero, or the Wii-grown Zelda game, and each of those series has seen content developed for it on the 64DD with its internet connectivity and re-writable storage. And how about Pilotwings with downloadable expansion packs for additional aircraft, events, and areas to fly in?

How much would you be willing to spend for a Nintendo-certified flash drive on which you could run downloaded games and applications directly? How much storage would be enough to suit your desires, and what would you hope to do be able to do with it? Does flash seem like the best bet to you, or do you believe it's a hard drive or nothing? Be sure to drop a comment for discussion.

• Five coloring book-style pages featuring the Mach 5 and Racer X's car (PDF file)
• A coupon for $1 off a Speed Racer Powerburst racer and $3 off a Speed Racer Powerburst figure-8 track set (PDF file)
• Two Speed Racer desktop wallpapers
• A Speed Racer family movie (MOV and WMV files)
• A special code for the Wii version of the video game (we wonder what that will do/unlock?)

Every (other) week, Mike Sylvester brings you REVOLUTIONARY, a look at the wide world of Wii possibilities.

Segueing from last edition's topic: you've just built a sick Smash Bros. Brawl level, and you're ready to share it with the world. You upload it to your website and throw up some pics from the game's handy built-in photo mode. Everybody can see your creation without needing to first go through the trouble of downloading the level, putting it on an SD card, and loading it up on their Wii. Of course, your level looks like so much fun, they won't be able to resist trying it for themselves. But what if, like so many other games, there was no photo mode? How would you display your masterpiece? Or maybe seeing a still pic isn't enough to really sell the dynamics and spirit of your build. Then what? Read on as we delve into the art of video capture and photo composition -- for games!

We've all had a gaming moment that we wish we could share with others. Verbally recounting the story of a miraculous victory or unbelievable defeat just doesn't have the same impact as actually seeing it. Or how about when you made your first Mii and told everybody that it looked "just like you." Anybody who's ever seen a Mii would have a tough time believing that these simplistic charicatures could be anyone's spitting image, yet seeing is believing.

The best images and videos I've personally produced have come from direct capture methods. Connecting my console to a TV tuner/video capture card, USB capture device, or even the video input on the back of my video card has netted me crisper, more colorful images than pointing a camera at the screen. It's much easier to go that route, too, as the picture generally doesn't need much (if any) further processing, except perhaps to crop off black bars surrounding the screen.

Once, I even connected the output of one computer to the input of another to get some clear gameplay footage and lessen the number of editing steps I'd have to go through when compositing some camera footage of my hands working the controller.

Barring direct capture, a digital video camera is going to give you the best quality for editing. DVD-R, hard disk drive, flash memory-based, digital video cassette, CCD, 3CCD, CMOS, SD, or HD -- there's a ton of options to choose from and covering each of those in depth is beyond the scope of this primer. But any of those choices will produce video that's higher resolution than what is displayed on YouTube. So if that's your ultimate goal, you pretty much can't go wrong with any dedicated digital video camera.

Web cams, on the other hand, can vary greatly in specs and image quality, but even mega cheap ones can produce acceptable results under the right circumstances and with a bit of editing. I bet you can't pick out which videos I've shot with a used $5 PlayStation 2 EyeToy.

For still pics, you can go with a digital camera, or kick it old school with a film camera and a photo scanner. Some would argue film is king, but for my money (and time), digital cameras rule.

Some digital video cameras support still picture shooting, but be advised: the quality of these photos is pretty shoddy compared to dedicated still cameras. You can also hook up a camera to some video capture hardware, which may be your best bet if the hardware lags too much to game while viewing what you're recording. Your camera won't mind if Mario moves a little sluggishly in response to your controls, but you sure will when you jump into a black hole for the 80th time straight.

If all you've got is a cell phone camera, I don't know what to tell you. As much as I love my iPhone, there's no denying that photography belongs on the top of the list of features they threw in as an afterthought, and in my experience, that seems to be the case with most cell phone cameras. As with anything, there are exceptions, but even those can't compare to even a "Wal-mart Special" dedicated digital camera.

We seldom take a photo or shoot a video that wouldn't benefit from some touching up or editing. The image may be too bright or too dark. Sounds may be too soft or too loud. There may be extra stuff in frame that doesn't need to be shown, or some captioning or diagrams may be necessary to point out objects of interest. Both Windows PCs and Macs come with video editors, and while the tools and features aren't as comprehensive as a thousand-dollar editing suite, it's enough to get your toes wet cutting clips together, adjusting the image quality, dubbing commentary, overlaying music, and throwing on captions and titles.

Use of "gateway editors" can lead to an addiction that must be fed with more potent packages. Avid Xpress, Adobe Premiere Pro, and Final Cut Pro don't come cheap, but they are so robust and powerful that they are industry standards used by the big boys. If you want to do a simple capture with minor editing, VirtualDub or one of its forks may be all you need to capture and cut together a video. If you're of the Ed Wood school of filmmaking, where first take is all it takes, YouTube lets you upload live feeds from a web cam. I've tried it out a couple of times myself, but if you want to see how I get down in Rock Band, you'll have to pay up.

Photo editing can be less time consuming, if all you want to do is crop a pic or try to enhance the visibility. With a few minutes tooling in your "photochopping" application of choice, a blurry smear of pixels can oftentimes be made to resemble the image you wanted to preserve.

Note: Results not typical

People who don't already have experience with photo or video editing applications usually feel overwhelmed by all the palettes, plugins, filters, fonts, effects, and tools at laid out before them. Even for a seasoned Photoshop veteran, the open source alternative looks at first glance like too much to learn. Go into it with a goal of what you want your finished product to look like, and the steps to getting there can be just a Google search away. Just playing around with it is the best way to learn the ins and outs of many editing programs, and some of the most impressive projects are done through experimental methods which may not have any prior documentation.

Prepping for a shoot is very important. "Garbage-In-Garbage-Out" is what we say in the graphics world when we have material that is too low quality to be made pretty. There're lots of things which, if ignored, can make your material uneditable garbage. Here are a few tips to keep in mind when prepping for a shoot:

Steady the camera
A tripod's your friend if you don't have a surface to sit your camera on. Even if you do have a surface, a smaller tripod may help you in positioning the camera optimally.

When a tripod isn't handy or is just not feasible, I've found that I can stabilize the camera by holding it close to my chest and holding my breath. That's just for photos, though. Neither myself, nor Wii Fanboy will be held responsible for any injury or brain damage resulting from holding your breath during a 30 minute video shoot of a Subspace Emissary bout.

Lighting
Flash reflects off of glossy screens, or washes out the picture on non-reflective ones, so turn your flash off. While you're at it, turn off any lights directly in view of the camera, behind, or to the side the screen. If turning off the lights isn't an option (Wii-ing in the dark can be dangerous), try to angle yourself so lights aren't reflecting off the screen.

Focus
Your web cam probably has a focus ring around the lens. Use it! What's the point of making a video or taking a picture when you can't make out what you're looking at?

If you're using a video camera, turn on manual focus. The same way your eyes are tricked into perceiving depth on a flat screen, your camera can also be fooled. You don't want it trying to decide what objects on screen it should focus on, because then it's blurring out everything else. Turn off the auto focus and adjust the lens so that the whole screen is sharp and clear in your view. (I've gotta remember to listen to my own advice on this one, because I forgot to do it for the video below.)

Sound
If using a microphone, try testing your TV at different volumes to find the sweet spot where it's loud enough, but not so loud that it's noisy or garbled. A microphone is essential if you want to provide commentary or just capture reactions from players and spectators in realtime. If you're going to edit the video later, you can always throw on voiceover at that time, too.

Some cameras have a line-in or microphone jack, and that can be used to record audio directly from the console, but the sound a console outputs may be too loud for the microphone input, and just make things too noisy. In that case, outputting from your TV (with the volume lowered) is a handy feature if your TV is sporting a set of output jacks.

Pick the right screen
By this I mean choose a display technology that's suitable for photographing. CRT televisions, even big screen projecting ones, don't hold up well to photographing or videoing. The constantly redrawing of the image, line by line leads to rolling black bars, flickering, and other visual artifacts which often can't be fixed in post. If it's at all an option, hook your console up to an LCD, plasma, LCOS, or DLP screen for shoots. My best photos were taken on an LCD monitor because the anti-glare coating eliminates reflections and there's no other display artifacts to fret over.

PC gamers have simple tools like FRAPS and GameCam for capturing video, and often times if they want to grab screenshot, it's as easy as hitting PrintScreen or a dedicated key pre-configured by the game's developer.

On the console side, we're rarely given the tools to record gameplay or take screenshots to share with others. While most racing games at least let you save ghost data and replays, and sometimes even enter a photo mode, there are few examples outside of that genre. Halo 3 set the bar pretty high in this respect by automatically saving replays for gamers to later watch from any perspective they can place their virtual camera. Smash Bros. Brawl followed suit with replay saves and a freely moveable 3D camera for screen grabs. We hold onto hope that, like stage builders and character creation, photo modes and replay saving become staples in games of the future. Where would we be if we thought "next gen" ended at upgrading graphics? There's no reason why we should rest at adding online functions or evolving controls.

If you haven't got top-of-the-line camera equipment or a 4-year degree in digital arts, don't be discouraged. As Wii fans, we're not the sort to let looks or presentation get in the way of enjoying the content or the vision. If I hadn't started out with the jankiest of ghetto setups, I wouldn't be here writing this for you now. A 15-year old VHS camcorder plugged into a DVD recorder, whose discs had to be ripped and transcoded before editing in Windows Movie Maker was what got me into video editing, a YouTube addiction, and writing about the GlovePIE scripts I was so eager to show off.

If you've shot any amazing gaming videos, have a photo of a cool Mii to show off, or have a story of a gaming moment you wish you could have "caught on tape," please share it with us in the comments.

Every (other) Tuesday, Mike Sylvester brings you REVOLUTIONARY, a look at the wide world of Wii possibilities.

The rhythm gaming genre, while relatively young, is already on the verge of becoming stale. Hitting buttons in time with a visual cue only remains as fresh as the accompanying song. But there's a new game that's set to turn the genre on its ear and destroy your preconceived notions of what a rhythm game can be. Today we'll be giving Audiosurf the GlovePIE treatment.

A few weeks ago I expressed my disdain for wipEout XL, which I had been playing to test its worthiness as a comparative platform for the Wiimote versus the SIXAXIS. It's admittedly a good game, but my experience with it at the time had been anything but. For a few months prior to the showdown, I was building a script for the game to demonstrate one of my favorite aspects of the Wii controller design. The script was to feature several different control methods that could be automatically selected by just holding the controller a certain way or plugging in a Nunchuk or Classic Controller.

Well, the PC version of wipEout XL, being old, does not run very well on today's machines. The already-fast game plays at hyper speeds on a modern machine and real Jedi reflexes are needed to control it. So I completely wiped it out of consideration for scripting, and suspended work on those projects which involved that game. And then came Audiosurf - a game that, at its core, is the embodiment of the "have it your way" sensibilities I wanted to express with my multifunctional script, and at the same time, it incorporates the high speed thrill ride dips and dives of a futuristic racer like wipEout.

Audiosurf lets you load up your own music, which the game analyzes to build levels. That alone is not an entirely novel idea, but the twist comes from the puzzle-style gameplay. The tracks are littered with colored blocks for you to collect and arrange, until they disappear and you're rewarded with points. It's a simple concept that's been the basis for countless great puzzle games, but the musical element dictates the placement of the pieces and the tempo of the music sets the speed at which the game runs.

At first I wanted to try controlling the game with just the IR sensor pushing the virtual mouse cursor. But the game is designed in such a way that miniscule flicks of the mouse can slide your ship from one side of the track to the other. I could have designed an IR script to accomodate for that, but I also wanted to keep the full range of mouse motion available for navigating menus and clicking on the pop-up dialogs that give you tips in the tutorial levels. So what I ultimately decided on was to have the IR sensor control the mouse pointer's full range, and limit the mouse range on the other controls.

var.MinXRes = (Screen.Width * .45)
var.MaxXRes = (Screen.Width * .55)
If (Wiimote.HasNunchuk = False) or Nunchuk.ZButton
// Mouse movement
If Wiimote.PointerVisible
(Mouse.X /2) = Wiimote.PointerX
(Mouse.Y /2) = Wiimote.PointerY
Else
Mouse.CursorPosX = smooth(MapRange(Wiimote.GX,1,-1,var.MinXRes,var.MaxXRes))
Mouse.Y = smooth(MapRange(Wiimote.GY,-.5,.5,1,-1))
EndIf
Else
Mouse.CursorPosX = smooth(MapRange(Nunchuk.JoyX,-1,1,var.MinXRes,var.MaxXRes))
Mouse.Y = smooth(MapRange(Nunchuk.JoyY,-1,1,0,1))
EndIf

Fewer than twenty lines of code gives us three ways to control the mouse pointer, which controls your "car" in the game. A couple more lines could add in Classic Controller support, which might even work well for Audiosurf's "Double Vision" mode. But we'll save that for another Revolutionary.

// Mouse Buttons
If Wiimote.A
Mouse.LeftButton = True
Else
Mouse.LeftButton = False
EndIf
If Wiimote.B
Mouse.RightButton = True
Else
Mouse.RightButton = False
EndIf
Key.Space = Wiimote.Home //Help
Key.Escape = Wiimote.Minus //Options
Key.Enter = Wiimote.Plus //Enter
Wiimote.Rumble = Wiimote.B //Rumble when firing
Shift + P + I + E = Wiimote.Two //Stops script running

My inspiration for this project came from using my iPhone. It, like the Wii Remote and Nunchuk, has an internal accelerometer for detecting tilt and motion, and the iPhone's iPod interface can change from a standard media player interface to the Cover Flow interface by just rotating the device. Around the time that I realized the brilliance of this simple trick, I was working on a script for Star Fox 2, and thought it would be neat if I could change from my Excite Truck style of Arwing control to a more natural joystick style of control when transforming my ship to the landwalker mode. Titles with varied gameplay are made all the more interesting with adaptable controls, but if transitioning between control methods initiates the change in gameplay style-- that's another degree of coolness.

Imagine a Rogue Squadron game in which you point your Remote at the screen to pilot your X-Wing in pursuit or evasion, and turning the Remote sideways "locks S-foils in attack mode" and gives you finer motion controls for banking and rolling. There are so many possibilities to explore, and I'll be exploring some of them in future GlovePIE scripts.

If you've got ideas for a game that might benefit from a control conversion, let us know in the comments.

1. Navigate to text box with Wii remote
2. Enter text on keyboard
3. Navigate to enter/search button with Wii remote
   
4. Profit. Very slow and awkward profit, but better than a poke in the eye with ye olde sharp stick.