"What Have You Done To My Wii?" or "Holy Crap Nintendo Does Listen"

First off, please excuse the crappy quality of my pictures here, they were taken with my phone as I can't seem to find my camera, besides, off screen photos always stink.

I have not turned on my Nintendo Wii in like two months. Today i wanted to play some Gamecube games, which meant turning on the Wii. After an arduous time setting up my wireless router for the n-th time (that thing can't hold settings to save it's life), and a LONG, LONG, LONG download time for the update (almost 30 minutes!, this isn't a PS3 guys) I finally updated to the 3.4 firmware.

I realize this firmware has been out for a while but I was obviously in the dark, however I have not seen this posted anywhere as of yet.

For a long time people have been complaining about the speed of the shopping channel, the download speed of the system in general (ie. updates), the small amount of internal storage on the Wii, the sluggish speed of the SD Memory Card interface, the lack of core games, and more. It seems to me that maybe Nintendo has been hearing the cries of the core and tech elite and have started to do something about it.

Not only does the Shopping channel download games much much faster than it used to, not only does everything transfer to and from my memory card faster, but the games now take up less space after you download them.

For instance, I just downloaded Paper Mario, a fairly good N64 RPG. First I was greeted by the standard download screen with mario running on the bottom collecting points and such (I should also note that I also saw a new mario animation, him and luigi swimming like the ocean levels)... and the following screen:


As the download finished (much faster than it did when I downloaded the game for the first time months ago (though I have since deleted it)) I saw the screen still saying 11 for Blocks After Download... the screen changed to the confirm screen and this showed up instead:


So it would seem Nintendo has been doing incremental updates to the Wii, and the only thing people were wondering with 3.4 was does it ruin HomeBrew Channel (HBC is a way for people to play user made games, indie titles, and games from other regions, as well as pirated games (though I doubt most people play pirated games on the Wii in the US, Japan, or most PAL countries, though I'm sure there are some.) The channel is not licensed by Nintendo and it is therefore their right to remove it from Wiis with an update, that's a risk people take when they use unlicensed software (I myself have not been able to use my Action Replay since the 3.0 update, I got over it).

As I stated in another article there are some good Wii games on the way, and I will be covering more of those soon, but Nintendo has also announced that this spring they will have an update that will alleviate the issues with the internal storage by way of the SD Card slot, which most likely means the ability to run WiiWare and such off of an SD card, which would be a godsend imho.

My main point here to those people complaining that Nintendo isn't listenting, maybe they are, maybe they just don't feel the need to toot their own horn like other companies until they do something great, not something that was expected.