Nintendo Refuses to Fix Third Party Software Issues from Wii Update
By Andrew on Wednesday, August 8th, 2007 at 12:29 PM PST In Game Consoles, Game Platforms, Nintendo
If you were looking to Nintendo to recognize their third-party products, you should give up hope. Their firmware update is here to stay, and they only look out for “official” Wii products.
Yesterday, Shawn posted about how the update nixed modded Wiis, leaving some of you out there some very Saaaaad Pandas. Unfortunately, according to gamesindustry.biz, Nintendo isn’t doing anything about it.
The biggest issue for people, it seems, was being able to use the Freeloader software to play import GameCube games on the Wii. Now, it looks like they’ll have to either dig out their old systems or buy a used one, which you can get from eBay for about thirty bucks.
For all Nintendo’s glory about innovative gameplay, they’re lame about backward compatibility. Could it be that they were pissed they were missing out on a whole market of unspent Wiipoints?
I don’t have my Wii hooked up to the internet, but aren’t only N64 and older games sold on the VC? You’d be a little crazy to buy Gamecube games, anyway, since you’d be able to go out and get the disc for cheaper in almost all cases.
It still suprises me that Nintendo didn’t go ahead and make the Wii region free (worked for the DS), but since they didn’t, I don’t see why its so bad for them to not allow 3rd parties to change it for them.
If it makes anyone feel any better, I would bet on all Nintendo consoles after the Wii to be region free, and it may be one of the changes they make to the Wii in the future. I don’t know how it all works, but I would imagine it would only be a small change, not that much different from the DS or PSP changes we’ve seen. I might be totally off, though.
On a final note, though, how the heck can you say Nintendo is lame about backward compatibility when the (80 gb or PAL 60 gb) PS3 and 360 don’t have 100% backward compatibilty and the Wii does? Sony is lame about backward compatibility. Microsoft was at least honest. Nintendo just made an update that made a few things not work, but those things weren’t meant to happen in the first place.
I don’t get how not supporting Freeloader is the same as Nintendo not supporting 3rd party developers? Isn’t gamers supporting Freeloader really hurting all developers except the pirating type?
“For all Nintendo’s glory about innovative gameplay, they’re lame about backward compatibility.”
This makes no sense. The wii has better software backward compatibility than the PS3 or 360. It plays games from half a dozen consoles for goodness sake. Bitch about the wii all you want, but don’t do it about backward compatibility when they are the only ones actually doing full BC this gen.
As for the free loader, it’s not even a Wii accessory. Its a gamecube accessory that has never been updated for the Wii. I would consider myself lucky that it worked in the Wii at all.
“It still suprises me that Nintendo didn’t go ahead and make the Wii region free (worked for the DS),”
The DS is easily region free because Nintendo has control over the display. Part of making region free hardware is supporting and scaling of various display sizes/resolutions/ and refresh rates. People in PAl regions dont have television that will work with an NTSC signal that the Wii produces and vice versa. Unlike the DS that has no NTSC or PAL issues whatsoever. I’m sure they could have made it region free but unlike the DS it likely would have been much more complicated and raised the cost of both the hardware and any games that needed to support more than one region.
Dumb. Nintendo shouldn’t be expected to support something that breaks its own rules.
“For all Nintendo’s glory about innovative gameplay, they’re lame about backward compatibility”
I’m not even going to attempt to explain why this is so incorrect. I think a guy a few posts above already took care of it anyway.
“Their firmware update is here to stay, and they only look out for “official†Wii products.”
Damn straight. Would you go out on a limb to support something that alters your hardware when they didn’t even ask for your approval?
Also, don’t expect a business, especially a multi-billion dollar business like Nintendo, to cater towards every desire you have.
If you want to bitch about Nintendo, then bitch about the right things – Endless, mediocre cash cows like Mario Party games and Pokemon games, reluctance to develop and promote new in-house IPs, and their obsession with useless peripherals which usually end up collecting dust in people’s closets.
Nintendo has Never liked cheating/modification devices. I remember they put out 3 or 4 versions of the ChronoTrigger catridge just so GameGenie wouldn’t work. They even sued GameGenie because it was allowing people to rent games and beat them in one Day. And your suprized they don’t want a to support this piracy device that was designed for GameCube?