The long, arduous process from Wii to Wii U.
http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/blog/32534
I only had to sit in the Fred Meyer electronics department for an hour before I was able to buy my Deluxe Wii U, pick up my wife from the airport, and come home. My intention was to download the OS update and go to sleep, but being the slightly OCD person I am, that didn't really happen. I got the thing home at 1:00, and I didn't go to sleep until 3:30. The whole process was pretty brutal, and there were a few times I thought I was screwed.
First of all, I had to set up the Wii U in such a way that I would have access to my still-hooked-up Wii, since I was—at some point—going to do a system transfer. I set up the new system on a chair next to the TV. Did you notice that the Wii U comes with an HDMI cable?! How glorious is that? Anyway, I set up both systems so that they'd be on separate inputs and went to work. The setup process for the Wii U is extremely simple and reminded me of that for the 3DS. It then more or less forces you to get on the Internet and look for updates... which it found.
As you've probably read by now, the update process is brutally long. It took my system over an hour, during which time the missus and I caught up on TV shows. But then it wasn't quite done. It had to install the new patch, which was a far briefer process but still seemed to take forever. It was something like 2:00 a.m. at this point, and I figured I'd just do the system transfer (how bad could it be?) and hit the hay.
The system transfer takes you into the Wii U's "Wii Channel," which acts like a Wii within the Wii U. Everything is the same. The menu, the sound effects, and even the storage capacity (which we'll get to). The Wii U has a Wii inside of it, with all the baggage that carries. Long before I left the house to buy my Wii U, I'd organized my VC and WiiWare games on my Wii and downloaded the Wii U transfer app. The weird part is that you also have to go into the Wii U's Wii Channel and download the Wii U Transfer Tool... from the Wii Shop Channel. There were times I couldn't tell whether I was on my Wii U or my Wii. It was a little spooky.
What you do, then, is place an SD card into the Wii and activate the transfer tool. It sucks up all the licenses, save data, Mii information, shop history, any remaining Wii Shop Channel points, etc., and then asks you to move the SD card into your Wii U. The animation for this is, as it was in the 3DS, involves adorable Pikmin carrying data from one place to another.
Once it gets back to the Wii U, you go into the Wii Channel and select the Wii Transfer Tool and the whole process goes in reverse: the Pikmin appear once more, carrying data from the Wii to the Wii U. A rolling display shows what's currently being downloaded. At about 30 percent completion, my progress bar just stopped, and the Pikmin animation looped forever: "Downloading Donkey Kong Country" for about 10 minutes. I didn't really know what to do. Turning off the system was begging for a fatal error in the transfer. Because the Wii U was only a few hours old, the Internet held no solutions.
Eventually, however, an error message popped up saying there was a problem and I should restart the system. Well, the system was in hard-lock. I couldn't actually turn it off, so I was forced to unplug the thing, wait 10 seconds, and plug it back in. Thankfully, when I again selected the Wii Channel, it prompted me to "continue the transfer" and things kept up as if there'd been no interruption. Things went smoothly that time, and by 3:00 a.m. all my data was transferred over.
Well, not ALL of it. Anything that couldn't fit on the SD card the first time was erased entirely, but because my download history carried over, I spent a little while re-downloading my other games. The funny thing is, though, that I could not save anything else to the "Wii System Memory" even though it's the Wii U. There's plenty more onboard space. I could, however, select the SD card. What this means is that the Wii U, in Wii mode, assumes it has the exact same amount of onboard space with which to save VC and WiiWare games. Everything else has to be put on an SD card. So I did that, but I thought it was pretty funny.
It's like somebody crammed two GameCubes duct taped together inside the Wii U! After all that, I left the living room in shambles—cords strewn about, remotes and booklets lying all over the place—and went to bed. Aside from adding to my friends List, I haven't even touched the system yet today!
Topic: Retiring the Wii (Read 3246 times)
