Nintendo Wii Fanboy

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

It is the year 2008 and we've all got jet packs to carry us from our front door to the flying car in our driveway. Our friends can leave us telepathic thoughtmails when we're summering in seclusion on the dark side of the moon. Skynet fought back and the treacherous Decepticons have conquered the Autobots' home planet of Cybertron. Everyone is basking in the realer-than-reality goodness of their HD television sets. Wait a minute ... scratch that last bit. Not everyone's got an HDTV or even a DTV, so that broadcast switchover to digital transmission that the FCC mandated for the years leading up to 2007 wound up getting postponed until 2009.

Nintendo engineers are patting themselves on the back (no doubt with fat stacks of cash) for predicting the relatively slow transition to HD, which allowed them to keep production costs down on the little white wonder. It's a point of contention to some, but seniors, girlfriends, your parents, and most Wii fanboys aren't giving it a lot of thought. Many people aren't even aware that it's not an HD console, so this edition of Revolutionary is intended to clear up any misunderstandings about the Wii's resolution ... -ary.

Many who've downloaded the Virtual Console's Punch-Out!! release are reporting that the boxing game isn't playing well with their HDTVs. Timing is paramount if you want to dodge punches and have your own jabs connect, but the HDTV response lag that sometimes occurs has a habit of knocking Little Mac's bloodied face onto the canvas, leaving him too dazed to even focus his eyes on the mouthguard dropped inches away.

Gamers with SDTV's haven't been experiencing any lag between their controllers and the onscreen fight, and explanations for the decreased response time lean towards blaming the televisions, so Nintendo doesn't seem to be at fault this time. Have you noticed any HDTV lag with Punch-Out!! or your other Virtual Console purchases?

(We know that Mike Tyson isn't in the VC release of Punch-Out!, but we saw the above comic at The Librarianist, and couldn't stop ourselves from using it!)