Please wait...
Over the weekend we "jailbroke" our Wii so the IGlet and IGlette could download and play custom courses on Mario Kart. It wasn't that difficult once we figured it out; unfortunately most of the instructions for this stuff are written by people who already know how to do it and don't take the time to explain in baby steps.
I have a feeling I'm going to be spending a lot of time with a graphics editor.
My daughter prefers to play as Princess Daisy but she likes the dress that Princess Peach wears. She wants me to hack the graphics to put Peach's dress onto Daisy.
I'm ok with this because I happen to think that Princess Daisy is an excellent role model for girls. She's assertive and forward and independent and doesn't wait for the boys to rescue her -- but at the same time she still manages to be feminine. "I'm a pretty princess and I'm wearing a dress and a tiara and I'm *still* going to kick your butt!" That's how my daughter is too. But at the same time, Peach has the pink dress, and IGlette's favorite color is pink, so a-hacking we will go...
Our Wii is primarily a Netflix/Amazon video streaming device, although my wife just finished Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. At 35 years of age, this is the first Nintendo game she's ever beat, and the first Zelda game she has ever even played seriously. And she only started because Siglet Prime wanted to play but couldn't read the dialogue, so needed her help. And then just for her to do it because it got hard to control.
Once you have "The Homebrew Channel" installed, all sorts of hacks are possible.
I suppose there are people who just use it to warez their games, but for mods there's a framework called "Riivolution" that basically applies patches to your games from SD card as the original game is loaded off the disc. Some are great, some are buggy, all are an adventure.
And of course there are people who use it to cheat at multiplayer games, which we don't do either.
A hacked Wii is a nice media streaming device and can play DVDs actually. But all my streaming attempts failded, the stream would hang. I only used it on a friends Wii, never hacked our device, because I didn't want to care about wether I can go online with it or not, wether to update or not, etc. Now that they probably will never again issue an update, I might hack our Wii, too.
The game I wasted most of my time on recently was released for Steam: I have no mouth, and I must scream! From the descriptions I read, I thought it was a bit more disturbing. But I enjoyed playing a point and click adventure again. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Scream_(video_game)
That's odd, the app worked fine the last time I tried, but that was maybe 3 month ago or so. But just a week ago I talked to a friend and she told me they use it to watch some tv shows with their kid, so I supposed it was still working.
I'll try to check it this afternoon and will report back.
hm, m. actively uses the new Utup channel to watch others build lego automatons.
however, in the homebrew you can run mplayer xmas edition or so, that should support http streaming.
I tested the youtube app and it was dead, I then removed the channel and also the "save game" via the Wii menu and reinstalled from the wii shop channel, now it is working again.
I just went to try that and am now finding that our Wii won't power up.
Clearly this is Microsoft's fault.
friend with a NES, but I have not touched a gaming system since.
My Wii died some time ago. Kind of a shame, but I'm more into using my computer than consoles these days.
@IG: Did the Wii respawn?!
I prefer the Wii (or a gaming console in general) for gaming, because if I find the time to play, I do not want to care about gpu drivers, setup of game controler, etc. Gaming on the PC is still a bit like the old DOS days, when the first level was to fight with config.sys about the amount of ram you were able to conquer for gaming...
My Wii starts having trouble to read some discs, but they are unscratched and without any dust. I hope this is a temporary thing...
And I'm happy to report that the solution of removing the YouTube channel and its associated save data, then reinstalling it, worked perfectly. We can now play YouTube videos on the Wii.
It even let me pair my phone and my tablet with the player, allowing either to be used as a remote control. That was kind of cool.
Good to hear, Ig!
How many devices can be repaired by unplugging and waiting... Did that with a laptop and a fax machine recently. Didn't dare to charge the owners, though, told it them it was a one time free service.
Your talks about Atari makes me wonder where my 2600 is and if it still works.
I just recently picked up an Atari system. 29 dollars for the system, 2
infrared remotes and 76 games built into the console. Was playing Spcae
Invaders and Adventure and laughing to myself.
That would be the "Atari Flashback 4" console. Funny how there's enough demand for the ancient classics that it made sense for someone to not only build those consoles, but keep them going for four different versions.
Heh. They've reduced the whole thing to basically just two chips. That's funny. There's even someone out there who modded it to accept cartridges ... although I suppose if you've got cartridges you've probably got your original console.