Hey folks, it's been a while yet again. It's amazing how fast time goes when college is riding you for all its worth. But a little while ago, I just got a new topic to rant on, and obviously as you can tell, it's about charge stations. Mind you, this rant may be a bit ill-informed since it's only based on what I've experienced over the last week. If the charge station you own works perfectly for you, then congratulations you have more luck with rechargeable batteries than I do. Anyway, on topic.

About two years ago, in the Winter of 2007, I got Christmas money, and I decided to buy a charging station for my Wii. There's one thing Wii remotes have a disadvantage with, and that's the fact that the batteries, at least for me, don't tend to last as long as I'd like them to. So in order to keep playing my Wii, I'd have to buy batteries on a regular basis, and I already put my parents through that strain when I was in my Gameboy days playing Pokemon to death. Of course now that I'm older, I'd have to buy those batteries myself, and buying them myself would be pinching me constantly and I wouldn't be able to buy the games I wanted for my Wii.

So I found out about the charge station from one of my friends, and since it seemed to work for him, I decided to check one out. Basically charging stations are devices that come with compatible Wii remote batteries that when you leave them in the station, they charge up more power so you don't have to buy new batteries. That would be cool, if they actually managed to keep working and not break on you.

I've had my charging station for over a year, and it worked fine, but then one day it started to not work as well as it should have. There were cases when I'd load the Wii remotes into my station, and the station is supposed to glow blue when it says it's charging, but when I took them out to play the game I wanted to play, it would stop functioning properly after about six minutes. That's when I started to notice that there was something wrong with the Wii remote batteries. So after much testing, the batteries seemed to be on their final days, and I thought it was simply time for some new batteries. Unfortunatley, life just can't be that simple.

I bought another station and two new batteries, but when I used these batteries after charging them, they didn't work any better than my old batteries. So I eventually decided to go back to playing with traditional batteries and, surprise surprise, they worked perfectly. No matter how many times I put the batteries into their stations and charged them until their lights faded out, they just would not fully charge at all.

Overall, I think this is what demonstrates the tremendous amount of "help" that charging stations give. Buying new batteries doesn't help, putting them in two different stations doesn't help, and not even leaving the battery in the station for two days seems to help (In fact I probably killed the battery by doing that&hellip. So there's the Wii Remote Charge Station in a nutshell, works for a year, and then decides to keel over. My dad recently got a charge unit for rechargeable batteries that I could use, and they work just as good as regular batteries do. So I'd say if you really want to be able to buy batteries so you don't have to buy too many more, than just go with this method.

That's my unfortunate life's story on this failed hardware, and I hope I at least managed to warn a few people about the overall risk of buying these stations. I don't know if I bought from the wrong brand or whatever, but I'm pretty displeased with this. For more productive contributions to the internet, please stay tuned for my Dune book mini-reviews and my Halloween special rant, you'll find out the subject when we cross that bridge. So until then, I'll try not to be a stranger. For that long at the very least.

That's the news from Myviewing as of October 26, 2009.