Sometimes sequels really stink. Jaws: The Revenge. Highlander II: The Quickening. Dumb and Dumber To. George Bush.
Nintendo’s successor to the multi-million selling Wii was like that. Reggie Fils-Aimé came out on stage and talked this thing up like it was “a Wii… for you…” and other some such vague bluster. He didn’t even let anybody know it was a new fricken console from Nintendo, so most people just assumed it was some tablet addon for the Wii.
So right off the bat, people were uninterested, a bit confused, and not really paying attention to begin with. But for some reason, this failure of a Nintendo console became the first Nintendo console I’d ever buy.
Hey, wait a minute, the Virtual Boy isn’t on that chart.
Anyway, right after a price drop (remember when consoles dropped in price after a few years?) I bought a nice black Wii U that came bundled with Super Mario 3D World and Nintendo Land, and some other games. I collected some more games for it when I found good deals, and eventually got 30 games this way.
And then promptly never played the thing again after around 2016.
There are a few reasons for that. For one thing, I learned that for all the artistry, creativity, and innovation that goes into making those vaunted Nintendo games, they just aren’t for me. Another reason – and it’s a big one – is that I learned that all Nintendo Wii U discs were cheaply made by Nintendo, are basically all defective, and are all falling apart and deteriorating as we speak, regardless of what condition they are kept in. In the words of Neil Peart:
Thanks, Geddy.
Knowing this, I was hesitant to play my Wii U games at all. “Should I play New Super Mario Bros U? Nah, what if it ruins the disc? I’ll play something else.”
And so my Wii U went unused, just sitting on a shelf above my PS4 and PS2 while I played lots of other games over the years.
Until now.
I heard about a recent way of soft-modding a Wii U so that I could just dump all my Wii U games (and Wii games too), install them onto a hard drive, and play them that way instead. I followed the Aroma guide at https://wiiu.hacks.guide/#/, and some very helpful information in these two videos here and here.
And over the next few days, I dumped my Wii U games, installed them to a hard drive, and did the same thing for my collection of Wii games, installing those to a flash drive. And now I can safely play all those Nintendo games that don’t really appeal to me without having to worry about the discs disintegrating because Nintendo cheaped out on making the discs.
I could go several steps further too, and make my Wii U the ultimate Nintendo game console, able to play games from every single Nintendo console and handheld up to its generation. A soft-modded virtual Wii can play Game Cube games natively, and there are emulators for the Nintendo 64, Nintendo DS, Game Boy Advance, Super Nintendo, Game Boy, and NES that can be installed onto a soft-modded Wii U. I have much better options for playing those games, so I won’t bother, but it’s pretty cool to know that the option is there for people.
So if you have an old Wii U just collecting dust, take a look at soft-modding it with Aroma. And do it fast, because Nintendo will be shutting down their Wii U servers in April of this year, which means no game updates for you if you haven’t downloaded them already.