Wii games from an external drive
That little angular white box has gathered some dust on my entertainment center, but for some reason I’m thinking a mod like this would act like a strong spray of Pledge. Lifehacker recently posted a guide called How to Back Up and Play Your Wii Games from an External Hard Drive. It’s one thing to want to play A Boy and His Blob, but it’s so much work to take whatever disc was in the Wii, find its case, find the new game box, open that case, get mad because some other game is in there, find the right game in a stack of “to file” discs on the table, and put the new game in the Wii. What is this, 1865? Much easier to just locate it on the hard drive, something PC gamers, iPhone owners, and PSN/XBLA folk are quite used to. And damn is that game browser sexy (and skinnable)!
I’m still a bit hesitant to hack my Wii, seeing as how some users have had trouble in the past, but a day of geeking out and a lifetime of disc-free gaming is so very tempting.
I am also unwilling to hack my Wii, though it gets more and more tempting every day it seems. This is something I would love to have, I don’t even buy PC games any more unless I know there is already a NOCD crack available. It may be that I am just extremely lazy, can’t even slide one disc out and slide another one in to play a game, but I love being able to play whatever I want, whenever I want, with the ease of a double click.
I can see why this would never become an actual Wii peripheral though, GameFly/Blockbuster here we come. Not that we don’t already have the ability to do just that anyway through our own individual ways, but it just is not worth the risk of what Nintendo may one day do to the hacked Wiis of the world if they figure out how to stop them (although I am not sure they will ever do anything about it as that part of the market, which is the part that has the ability to do such things, could easily just boycott Nintendo and go back to their Xbox/PS3 etc..
If I did mod my Wii, and Nintendo did do something along the lines of the XBox ban from Live, it would make my Wii pretty much useless as I spend way more time downloading and playing virtual console games than I do playing actual new Wii titles.
There is a reason why your Wii may be collecting dust, mine does as well. One could steal a lot of points from your previous posts about apps for the ipod touch/iphone and apply them to the people making games for the Wii. How many actual good games are there out for the Wii at the moment? I do not rent/borrow games, there are extremely limited if any demos available for Wii games, so I rarely pick up any new titles. This may mean I have missed out on hordes of awesome Wii titles, but I doubt it (let’s face it, if you been gaming as long as I have, which I am sure you have been, you can damn near pick a good game off the shelf by the box, and the company that put it out).
Anyway, I have ran on a bit long about nothing in particular I suppose. I am curious though, how many good titles have you found on the Wii. Not counting WiiWare (which is in itself disappointing) and VC? I come up with 8-10 and a couple of those are only because they offer decent multi-player modes that my wife will actually play with me.
On the one hand, I like digital game downloads over CD/DVDs, but on the other, I’d love to run everything I own from an old floppy disc.
The ease of use with just clicking and playing is hard to ignore. I don’t see why future console generations wouldn’t go this route, and yeah, GameFly could have a field day with this if the bandwidth were affordable. Maybe OnLive is a step in that direction?
The Wii is so full of bad, bad games. It hurts me. Didn’t Nintendo used to be the company that was all about quality? Remember that little seal back in the NES days? The VC releases are pretty much what has made it worth the time, and I’ve found a few good WiiWare games as well. Overall, it’s a cute dust collector, though.
Good games for Wii? Ugh. Tough question. For the most part, the games I’ve enjoyed the most have been re-releases (Metroid Prime Trilogy) or updates to existing games (NSMB Wii, SMG). I’d actually have to agree with your 8-10 estimate, and for the same reason as well: multiplayer. Wii is great for getting people together, if only more people in my town even knew what a video game was, that’d be even more useful. As it stands, online multiplayer is my bread and butter, and both Xbox and PS3 do that so much better.
I did find joy in a few random games; Boom Blox Bash Party, and DeBlob were great. Other than that its pretty much Mario remakes for me as well; party/kart/paper/etc…; new SMB is unbelievably good as well.
I have to give props to Raving Rabids as well, mostly because it made me realise that my wife will actually play rail shooters (it is near impossible to get her to play console games) and led to me buying pretty much all the ones available. I only wish they weren’t so short, damn you darkside chronicles.