Topics

1

Nintendo Gaming / Wii Homebrew Channel

« on: May 25, 2008, 08:40:12 PM »

The Homebrew Channel has been released; allows you to easily run stuff from your SD card without having to rearrange your files and do the Twilight Princess trick every time, and has quite a nice interface.

I have to wonder, though, about the wisdom of making a special channel for this that shows up in your play history and everything.  We know Nintendo is spying on us; seems like calling attention to it like that will only expedite their attempts to disable it.

But that didn't stop me from trying it out.  Finally I can accomplish my lifelong dream of playing SCUMM games with the Wiimote.

2

Nintendo Gaming / FFCC: My Life as a King

« on: May 17, 2008, 08:46:41 AM »

Why is nobody talking about this game?

I was on the fence about downloading it because I couldn't really get a good idea of how it actually played, but I finally did and I'm pleasantly surprised.  It actually reminds me a lot of Harvest Moon, except instead of vegetables and livestock, you're sort of cultivating adventurers, and each in-game day you do a little upkeep on them and can then wander around the town improving relationships/morale or working on building new additions to your kingdom/farm.

Meanwhile, your guys are out doing whatever you told them to do, which might be gathering materials, exploring, fighting bosses, finding out how to build new types of buildings, etc., and you reap the benefits of their labor without having to endure the tedium of actually doing the fighting yourself.  (But you can actually read a turn-by-turn recap of each battle in the daily reports if you want.)  You also have a little bit of control over your individual guys' attributes by giving them stat bonuses when they complete important missions.

I'm currently somewhere in "Chapter II" (I don't know how many there are), and it's looking like I'm about to start learning how to use magic and organize my adventurers into parties.  This game has a lot more meat to it than I was expecting.

I think LostWinds was the "must-play" of the WiiWare launch, but FFCC:MLAK (sheesh) is also quite appealing to me as the kind of nerd who enjoys keeping track of lots of statistics, and it's clearly going to last me a lot longer.  And honestly, as tempting as it is to bitch about WiiWare prices, I could get both of these games and at least one more for less than the price of a standard Wii game, and without having to go to Gamestop and refuse to buy the strategy guide and warranty.  I think that's a pretty decent deal.  (Though I did have to do a lot of fridge-cleaning.)

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Nintendo Gaming / Wii repairs

« on: September 18, 2007, 04:56:31 AM »

I recently sent my Wii to NOA for repairs after I started noticing graphical glitches in several games, in the form of scattered patches of wrongly-colored pixels in certain areas of the screen (especially in Resident Evil 4, but you could also see them sometimes in Twilight Princess and Metroid, and occasionally some N64 virtual console games).  After a little bit of research on the web, I saw some people with similar (but worse) issues, saying that it was a result of the GPU overheating while the Wii was in standby mode with WiiConnect24 enabled.  I've never noticed my console getting particularly warm, even when running games, but at any rate I sent it in.

So, my question is, if it is the WiiConnect24 thing that's the problem, is it safe to continue running WiiConnect24 once I get the thing back from Nintendo?  I know there was a firmware update a while ago that supposedly enables the fan to run in standby mode (but I've never seen that actually happen), and I'm hoping that the repair will fix or replace whatever did cause it to happen in the first place, but I was wondering if anybody else had had this happen or knew how it turned out.