The bad news I have been a bit AWOL and planned to post this last week. The good news is that im back (lol) with a review that I hope to help save you some money. I bought resident Evil Umbrella Chronicles and though to my self about how fugly the Wii Zapper looked. After a few minutes of bitching I remembered about Penguin United Wii Pistol I posted about here some months ago. So… I ordered it… it arrived… I unboxed it. It cost about $19 and arrived rather quickly. Heres my review and thoughts. Matter of fact using the Penguin United Wiin Pistol gave me a few revelations about Nintendo’s Zapper design choice. Since then I have also bought the Wii Zapper which I will also review and compare.

The Penguin United Wii Pistol looks great. The nunchuck port at the bottom of the handle allows for one handed pew-pew action. The downfall of the Wii pistol is the trigger. Its a huge problem that makes me think that they never actually tested using it in an actual game. The trigger is tied to a spring mechanism that requires too much power or pull to register a button press on the wiimote “B” button. Not only do you have to pull the trigger too far to register a hit but the amount of pressure you need to pull on the trigger caused my aim to be waay off. The pistol would move slightly up after exerting the force needed to pull the trigger killing all hopes of accurate head shots in resident Evil Umbrella Chronicles and forget about Crossbow Training which I also tested it on.

Also I realized that Nintendo realized that since the Wii zapper/shooter games uses reticles then two hands would be necessary to keep the damn reticle steady. pulling triggers in a one handed gun tends moves your hand from its original position. Two hands helps to keep the reticle and gun steady when shooting. Also you get less tired using two hands. I think Nintendo actually tested this and thats why they went the two handed zapper route. I appreciate the two handedness of the Zapper much more after using the Wii pistol.

So in short if you buy a third party zapper/gun shell thingy make sure that theres no spring in the trigger mechanism. Also two hands may not look as cool but its better than one for aiming. Here are some more pics.

Wii Pistol Hack:

To remedy the problem of the trigger registering button presses I was able to crudely “hack” it to register buttion presses with less of a trigger press. To do it I unscrewed it, opened it up and placed a plastic USB cover thingy at the top of the trigger mechanism inside. See the photos for an illustration. With the hack it worked alot better and was almost acceptable. Still the Wii pistol will be the one my guests get (HA HA) when they come over for two player action. Ill use the Zapper.

Peace!