As an unabashed fan of Cave Story, I decided it was time to prep my Wii for the upcoming WiiWare release. It’s a few weeks away but why procrastinate? March 22nd could sneak up LIKE THAT! Especially if you are me and seriously calendar impaired. I mean, Final Fantasy XIII is practically upon us, too! There a FF piece in my head that wants to be heard but that takes a back seat to today’s Nintendo issue. See, I have the Homebrew Channel. There, I said it. This should be surprising to absolutely none of you. Err, well, see, I had the Homebrew Channel. In my haste to update my long-offline system I forgot that 4.2U was gonna wipe it off the planet. Did I mention I was offline with it for a while? It’s not too great a loss since I lost the SD card with all my homebrew and I can always add it back.
I do not run wifi at my place since I like to keep everything wired. I’m a pain that way. This always gets mentioned when people come to visit with their laptops but I have a solid router and lots of long cables so they quickly quit their bitchin’. This does not help me with the Wii that much. Nintendo presents 3 options for getting online and that has since gone down to 2.
1.) run your own wifi router
2.) purchase their (or third-party) wired adapter
3.) OLD: purchased their PC-based wifi adapter specifically for the Wii and DS.
I had always relied on option 3 in the past. I ran XP until rather recently — my tablet upgraded to Vista but my main PC had too many XP programs that I didn’t want to risk compatibility mode — and the adapter was also XP-based. Nintendo pretends that anything after that does not exist. You know, kinda like how they feel that no one really wants to play online anyway *rimshot* ;)
This, however, isn’t entirely true. Nintendo US says Windows 7 is not supported while Nintendo Europe decided to come to the rescue! Sort of. I think my adapter is borked but I cannot 100% claim whether that is due to hardware or software. My main PC runs win7 ultimate, my tablet runs home premium. It works on my tablet, mostly, but not my PC. In Ultimate I had tried to run the Nintendo US software with compatibility mode a few times but I would get an error right at the end since it somehow lost connection to the USB adapter, even though nothing had changed. On my tablet, I ran the Nintendo Europe software first with Vista SP2 compatibility mode and it installed without issue! From there I connected my Wii to it and everything was peachy. My system updated, HBC disappeared, and I was able to get into the store and update all the channels again… until I reset the tablet and console. The magical reset blew up something invisible, far as I can tell. The Wii could talk to the PC but not connect to the internet, no matter what I tweaked or disabled (it’s not a fan of firewalls or virus protection programs during the installation and I added exceptions after that). Yet, when I un- and re-installed the program, it all worked again. Nonsense, eh? In the end I spent waaaay too much time fighting with all of this stuff and it really wasn’t worth it. Instead, I’ll just dig out my wifi router from the closet and lock it down. This morning I was sad that Nintendo stopped selling the dongle. OH HOW THINGS CHANGE. If your place is all wired, and you are reasonably tech-inclined, you are probably better off running a router of your own since you can also use that with your laptops and other devices. If you are not up for locking down the router securely, get the wired LAN adapter.
Now I’m not going to look at my Wii until Cave Story comes out and shoot stuff in Borderlands until I feel better. You know what else contributes to my present Nintendo ire? Why, I’ll tell you. Did no one in Nintendo ever sit with their menu screen open for any >1min block of time? I’m guessing not or there would be an option to turn it off without having to mute the tv. It’s worse then elevator music. Forget using classical music as punishment, USE THIS INSTEAD. They’ll be begging to do community service or anything else to make it stop. For the record, I love classical music! <3 CBC radio stream.
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I just don’t understand how Nintendo can be so successful and so full of fail simultaneously. A quick look at the PC and the OF Xbox should’ve told any analyst that online was big and your game company might want to look into options.
The original PS3 was expensive, but at least it gave the consumer more choice then any console to date. I mean from what I’ve read it’s easier to get into an online game of Mario Kart on the DS then on the Wii. How hard would it be to post a survey for this kind of thing? Seriously Nintendo ask some people next time.
Trololo – Advanced Russian Weapons Program :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTSA_sWGM44
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