Wii R.I.P 12/25/06 - 3/14/07

[Grasshopper]

My Wii passed away early Wednesday morning. After a mere 3 months, the system dies within it's infancy.

I've seen people talk about getting error codes after updating which pretty much bricks the system, but I have a different situation. I get the dreaded "black screen".

I find it odd because I was playing with it before work. Looking at the new vote channel. Everything was working fine. I turned the system off, and after I got back from work, I turned the system back on to play. The disclaimer that usually pops up on the screen never showed up. Instead, the TV is just remained black. No error message, no Wii channel interface, not disclaimer, no chimey music...nothing.

Anyone else know of, or have had this problem?

[Dupl!cate]

I have heard of it, but not seen it.

And how the hell did you get one for christmas? I got a wah pedal cos' everyone bought one before my mom, and she looked like a muggafugga for one.

[Glenn the Great]

/cry

Wii hardly knew ye...

[Tygore]

How long does Nintendo warranty the Wii? I bet you can still send it in for a replacement, if you do it now.

[Warlock]

I have heard of it, but not seen it.

/\

Anyways, contact Nintendo. They will replace it for free. I think warranty is 1 year plus an extra year if you register it online at nintendo.com. But there may be some issues (like the above) that they will handle regardless of warranty, I'm not sure. Nintendo is usually very good about customer service this way.

My Wii has been semi-buggy in that it has locked up on occassion, but it hasn't failed. I think Nintendo rushed this one out the door a bit though, which is unlike them. They usually have the most reliable systems.

P.S. - I have heard several issues of overheating due to the fans not coming on propperly (like when you have Wii24Connect running). Usually I've just heard that the video card will fry and there will be graphical distortions, but maybe it fried your processor or something and that's what happened. Just a guess.

[beefster09]

I suppose in this case, It may actually be good that I haven't gotten a Wii yet. Of course they probably haven't quite worked out all of the bugs yet.

[Revfan9]

Well, it seems as if most of the crashing bugs are related to bugs in the firmware when the system is updated. PSP, lol.

At this point, I'm kinda glad that I have dial-up. No connect24 for me :D

[Glenn the Great]

I suppose in this case, It may actually be good that I haven't gotten a Wii yet. Of course they probably haven't quite worked out all of the bugs yet.

If you want to keep the bugs out of your Wii, I'd advise that you wash it daily, and don't let anyone you don't know very well play with it.

[Orion]

Mine gets hot and turns itself compeltely off (as in the little LED goes off) while it's in stand-by. It also has the occasional glitch. I don't think the Wii's firmware is very sound either.

[MottZilla]

Most defects are probably because the system is made in China. Shame on all the console players. Now every fucking system is made in China, except maybe some PS3s, not sure. I leave my Wii unplugged (no standby) and I don't let it access that WiiConnect24 either. It works fine.

[Grasshopper]

I never leave mine plugged up either. And since I don't have a wireless router I don't get on WiiConnect 24. I do manually update my Wii just so I was able to get the Opera browser and such, but its never on when I don't use it, and my computer is off when I'm not using it.

[AtmaWeapon]

You know this is really why I don't like the idea of "firmware upgrades" for consoles. One of the major advantages consoles used to have over PCs was that they worked and always worked and you pretty much had to do something violent to break them. Now you push the power button at the wrong time and oops!

[Warlock]

You know this is really why I don't like the idea of "firmware upgrades" for consoles. One of the major advantages consoles used to have over PCs was that they worked and always worked and you pretty much had to do something violent to break them. Now you push the power button at the wrong time and oops!

Well that's not true. Consoles often times *did not* work. Nintendo has been different largely because they are an extremely reliable manufacturer. Sony and Microsoft tend to opt for cheap labor, thus you get shoddy work and you hear stories of Xboxes overheating or PS2s failing, etc. But even still, Nintendo consoles did fail on occassion. The original NES certain was a good example of a rather brick-prone console (or at least a "we want to make your system constantly reset over and over" console).

But even still - pre-GC/PS2/Xbox, most consoles did not really have an OS (PSX is an exception, and maybe some Sega consoles, I dunno). You put the game in, it booted. Bam. But now consoles have OSes built in, they have advanced features like weather reports, internal hard drives, etc etc. That's the kind of stuff that is more prone to fail and that's the kind of thing a firmware update can fix. Of course, other stuff, such as overheating, are hardware oversights (i.e. not enough fans for the power consumption). The exception with Wii being that there is a bug that the fans will not always come on in standby mode - and that can be fixed with firmware as well. But that is just a flaw of modern systems that just need much more power.

Anyways, firmware updates, and furthermore game patches, can at the same time be bad. It depends on the attitude. Many companies will take a "push it out the door, we'll fix it later" attitude. Previously this approach was not possible as obviously you can't patch a physical medium such as a CD or Cartraige. And those systems did not have any real internal memory to store patches. But that has changed, and with patching as a possibility, that allows a bit of laziness to creep in which is bad.

Now Nintendo I am not so worried about though. Like I said, they tend to be a very reliable company and at least make a decent effort to eliminate or minimize this sort of thing. Obviously not everything is caught (ex: there are something like 5 different versions of the OoT N64 cartraige with bugfixes and unfortunately some censorship.. stupid people and their green blood :P) but at least they try. Wii seems to be the buggiest thing I've seen them release, which is pretty good because it's not *that* buggy. I suspect there is a bit of a supply race that prevents them from taking as much care as they usually do.

But to get back on topic, in terms of the problems I've seen with Wii, I think firmware could solve all of them. Most seem to be software issues with the OS, and then of course there is the fan issue but that is also software-related. So these things can be resolved.

[MottZilla]

Well that's not true. Consoles often times *did not* work. Nintendo has been different largely because they are an extremely reliable manufacturer. Sony and Microsoft tend to opt for cheap labor, thus you get shoddy work and you hear stories of Xboxes overheating or PS2s failing, etc. But even still, Nintendo consoles did fail on occassion. The original NES certain was a good example of a rather brick-prone console (or at least a "we want to make your system constantly reset over and over" console).

Until rather recently, most video game consoles were made in Japan. Quality was very good. Sega esspecially made their systems such as their disc based ones very durable. However things have gone down hill. Now almost all video game consoles are made in China. Quality is not a concern really. They just want it made as cheaply as possible. The only expection might be that you could find a PS3 made in japan perhaps.

It's really quite sad and I blame Sony as they took the lead on this. They are the ones that started the cheap ass hardware and cheap ass chinese manufacturing trend.



But even still - pre-GC/PS2/Xbox, most consoles did not really have an OS (PSX is an exception, and maybe some Sega consoles, I dunno). You put the game in, it booted. Bam. But now consoles have OSes built in, they have advanced features like weather reports, internal hard drives, etc etc. That's the kind of stuff that is more prone to fail and that's the kind of thing a firmware update can fix.

The Xbox was the first video game console to really run a sort of operating system with its kernel and windows like design. The GC and PS2 weren't really anything like that. They did have a bios that included a menu but nothing really notable to call it an operating system.



Anyways, firmware updates, and furthermore game patches, can at the same time be bad. It depends on the attitude. Many companies will take a "push it out the door, we'll fix it later" attitude. Previously this approach was not possible as obviously you can't patch a physical medium such as a CD or Cartraige. And those systems did not have any real internal memory to store patches. But that has changed, and with patching as a possibility, that allows a bit of laziness to creep in which is bad.


I agree with you here. God I can't remember how many bugs had to be fixed for Rainbow Six Vegas on 360. I recall seeing a pretty massive list. But then again Ubisoft isn't really that great of a developer. Infact R6 Vegas probably would have sucked if it weren't for it using Unreal technology from Epic Games.

[shadowboxer2007]

Thats sad nintendo will replace it. Also if you what free games i know a way they will send you some for free pm me! they are a great companey i got over 13 games free from them.

[Nicholas Steel]

Anyways, firmware updates, and furthermore game patches, can at the same time be bad. It depends on the attitude. Many companies will take a "push it out the door, we'll fix it later" attitude. Previously this approach was not possible as obviously you can't patch a physical medium such as a CD or Cartridge. And those systems did not have any real internal memory to store patches. But that has changed, and with patching as a possibility, that allows a bit of laziness to creep in which is bad.

this reminds of EA Games for some reason... except they always release a limited # of updates then cancel all support for the product... other companies like westwood and blizzard etc. may do this but looking at Warcraft III and Starcraft you can see that they keep support and pretty much are always looking to improve there games, which is awesome, i congratulate them on there hard work... if i win the lotto i would seriously consider donating money to at least blizzard (since westwood was bought by EA they can go to hell :p).

[Orion]

On the subject of console BIOS, It really kind of irks me that I can't just pop a game in and have it play anymore. Both the Wii and DS go to their menu screens by default (I know you can change it on the DS, but it's a big oversight on the Wii). I've never seen the PS3 boot up so I don't know how that works, and I can't remember what the 360 did since I sold it awhile back (stupid me), but at least you could pause the game while you went to their menu instead of having to restart it.

[Warlock]

On the subject of console BIOS, It really kind of irks me that I can't just pop a game in and have it play anymore. Both the Wii and DS go to their menu screens by default (I know you can change it on the DS, but it's a big oversight on the Wii). I've never seen the PS3 boot up so I don't know how that works, and I can't remember what the 360 did since I sold it awhile back (stupid me), but at least you could pause the game while you went to their menu instead of having to restart it.

This doesn't bother me much on Wii. Maybe it's the fact that I'm actually sometimes interested in those other menu options, I dunno. At the very least, the pointer interface is easy enough. It bothers me a little that the load time is slow though - but that is something Iwata and Miyamoto and co keep saying they want to improve - so maybe with firmware updates?

But it always bothered me on PS2, to the point where it bugged the crap out of me. I just really hated the menu system for that, and while it would auto-boot *eventually*, you had to wait something like a full minute, then wait for the stupid PS2 logo to display, along with whatever logos the game actually had (but those could usually be cancelled with Start, I don't think you could ever skip the PSX/PS2 logo).

[Cloral]

I think you must've had a bad PS2. Mine always boots up within about 5 seconds. And yes, it does always display the PS2 logo, but that is simply to mask the time it spends loading the executable off of the disk.

BTW, 360 defaults to boot to the game if you've got a game in it when you turn it on (this can be turned off). If not it goes to the dashboard, and when you put in a game, the option at the bottom of each page of the dashboard turn into 'play game'. I don't believe there's any way to get it to automatically run the game when you insert it once the system's already on.

[MottZilla]

When I'm at the 360 Dashboard, inserting a game disc or DVD movie will make it automatically play.

And yes the PS2 doesn't take THAT long to get through the bios unless it's having trouble reading the disc. Plus with the long load times in the games themselves it's not out of place. ;p