On Monday, I find that my 1019 Gamecube memory card save files became corrupted. I lost all my saves from:
Super Smash Bros. Melee
Eternal Darkness
Phantasy Star Online
Metroid Prime
Viewtiful Joe
Skies of Arcadia Legends
Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes
Super Mario Strikers
Metroid Prime 2: Echoes
Resident Evil 4
The Legend of Zelda Collector's Edition
Beyond Good and Evil
There goes 6 years of "work." I thought it might have been my Wii, but my internal flash memory is fine. I still have all the channels and my Wii saves. I tried my GCN memory card at Game Crazy and the card itself was corrupted and would no longer save data. It's not even an old memory card either since I got it last July. It sucks that I lost all my saves, but on the bright side, the manager of Game Crazy replaced my memory card free of charge and I didn't even buy it there. He's just a nice guy.
Here's the thing. A friend/coworker of mine said that the same exact thing happened to his SD card and GCN memory card and he thinks that it was probably from the Wii getting too warm. I had noticed that the Wii gets warm, almost hot, when WiiConnect24 is on which is why I turned it off a few months ago. I just turned WiiConnect24 on again and left it on since last week to add a few coworkers and exchange Miis. I didn't have a problem with using Wii for Gamecube games before and certainly never with Gamecube so I do think this whole mess was related to turning WiiConnect24 back on. Maybe it just fried the card.
I've asked everyone I know who has a Wii and only my one friend had encountered a similar problem. Everyone else leaves their memory cards in there and they work fine. Has anyone else encountered something like this? Is it possible to only have the console access the internet while it's actually on? Yes, technically WiiConnect24 means the console is "on," but you know what I mean.
And by the way, this was the second time out of 2 times I've called Nintendo Customer Service in which they've failed completely in helping in any way possible. The first was the cracked DS Lite hinge AFTER they announced that fixing it was free. The service rep told me to send it in with, I think, $25 even after I explained that I just read that it was a manufacturing defect and that Nintendo would replace it for free AND that I was still under warranty anyway. $25 was apparently the discounted repair/replacement price for the cracked hinge. This time the service rep told me that I should probably just buy a new GCN memory card though she sounded new. I guess I should have asked to speak to someone else. I've heard nothing but great things from Nintendo Customer Service, but goddamn, they're 0 for 2 from my experience.