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Is the Wii dead?


Frozone212

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Yeah, I'd think so. Although a lot of the more high profile Wii and Wii U games have been ported to the Switch there are still a heck of a lot that haven't.

 

Game prices are all over the place. You can pick up most of the library for under $10 - sometimes in job lots - but expect to be spending 10-20x that for something rare and collectable like Radiant Dawn or The Last Story.

 

They're very hackable machines too. A soft-modded Wii U not only plays Wii/Wii U games natively but also GameCube ones and can be used as an emulator box for all their prior home systems and the handhelds up to the DS. The Wii is a fair bit less capable but you still get GameCube compatibility for free, at least with the early models.

 

There's also a bit of a scene for turning Wii units into handhelds. Kits were being sold at one point even, although they're sold out now and you'd have to source the parts yourself if you wanted to go down that route.

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If you don't mind the lack of HD resolutions/HDMI, the Wii is a pretty versatile machine.

The eShop is dead now, but when it was still around, you had a lot of additional options there.

I've been able to grab a lot of titles at cheap prices (<$10), but some are worth a bit more. I've still got some gaps in my library that need filling.

 

And like Matt_B said, the Wii makes an awesome emulation box, especially if you have a CRT, a lot of emulators support 240p.

And it's really easy to soft mod.

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It's the best Gamecube "emulator" (practically the real thing), also a very decent and cheap emu box in general (runs everything well but MAME). As an added bonus it connects to CRTs with ease and delivers perfect RGB 240p without need for expensive cables.

Edited by youxia
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The last Just Dance for the Wii was released in 2019, so it's dead now. Consider that the Gamecube has better video output for Gamecube games and the Wii U can give you Wii games over HDMI before you actually buy a Wii. It is extremely easy to hack the Wii, though, and you can run games from its SD card. The Wii runs Gamecube games natively instead of emulating them from what I understand, and I believe that hacked Wii Us do as well. I am not certain if Wii + OSSC or whatever gives better quality video than Wii U's native HDMI because I'm too lazy to test it to find out.

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Dolphin is certainly an option. It's now at the stage where it'll emulate all the Wii and GameCube games that anyone gives a damn about. There'll be a few glitches here and there, so it's perhaps not the best way to experience new games, but almost all of them are playable end to end on it. It's also not terribly demanding, to the extent that a lot of handheld devices can run it.

 

Wii U emulation has a long way to go though, as you'll only get about half the library with Cemu, albeit skewed heavily towards the better exclusives. Breath of the Wild is pretty much flawless on it now though, and I'd even say that it's the best way to play the game with mods; they're quite fiddly to install on the real hardware and often too demanding for it.

 

 

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Yeah, the Wii's online store died some time ago. Just go buy physical copies. It's the Wii. They made a LOT of copies of all of the major Wii games and they should still be cheap. Wii U's online store is still alive for now, though, and I think you can get some Wii games there.

Edited by Steven Pendleton
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5 hours ago, Steven Pendleton said:

Yeah, the Wii's online store died some time ago. Just go buy physical copies. It's the Wii. They made a LOT of copies of all of the major Wii games and they should still be cheap. Wii U's online store is still alive for now, though, and I think you can get some Wii games there.

The Wii didn't work that way.   The games on physical disc were not in the Wii shop,  the WiiWare games that were available there were never available on disc that I'm aware of.   It was like they Wii had two completely separate game libraries, one physical only the other digital only.

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4 hours ago, Rick Dangerous said:

I mean what console is really dead these days?  The Wii requires no updates.  I'm sure we'll see some releases down the road a bit; from Limited Run games or the like. 

It's already happening. Shakedown Hawaii and Retro City Rampage got physical releases last year.

 

They'll probably be few and far between though because disc releases require a fairly substantial production run just to break even.

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10 hours ago, zzip said:

The Wii didn't work that way.   The games on physical disc were not in the Wii shop,  the WiiWare games that were available there were never available on disc that I'm aware of.   It was like they Wii had two completely separate game libraries, one physical only the other digital only.

Right, but maybe Frozone was looking forward to Virtual Console?

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13 hours ago, Rick Dangerous said:

I mean what console is really dead these days?  The Wii requires no updates.  I'm sure we'll see some releases down the road a bit; from Limited Run games or the like. 

Not in North America. Nintendo if America was unable to go through the certification process for Wii games when those releases happened in Europe, which is why we didn't get Retro City Rampage DX and Shakedown Hawaii on disc for Wii (And why the latter was ported to the Wii U for North America since NOA hadn't quite disassembled the infrastructure for Wii U physical releases; I assume they figured the WiiWare release of RCR would suffice for Wii U owners so didn't port that one). 

 

Very safe to say that we won't be seeing any more physical Wii releases. Maybe someday years down the road we'll see some company release something masquerading as one, but it would only play on a hacked Wii.

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15 hours ago, Atariboy said:

Not in North America. Nintendo if America was unable to go through the certification process for Wii games when those releases happened in Europe, which is why we didn't get Retro City Rampage DX and Shakedown Hawaii on disc for Wii (And why the latter was ported to the Wii U for North America since NOA hadn't quite disassembled the infrastructure for Wii U physical releases; I assume they figured the WiiWare release of RCR would suffice for Wii U owners so didn't port that one). 

 

Very safe to say that we won't be seeing any more physical Wii releases. Maybe someday years down the road we'll see some company release something masquerading as one, but it would only play on a hacked Wii.

Thanks. That was an interesting read.

 

I'd rather assumed that the games were homebrew releases, but it makes it even better that they managed to squeak through the official process. I suppose that explains why they needed a production run of 3000 units too; it's an expensive business compared to homebrew carts where the economics tend to work better when you keep the numbers small.


Any future releases would obviously have to run unsigned code but it's already possible to do this on a Wii that hasn't been hacked via various exploits. I'll be quietly optimistic that there will be releases to come that you can just pop in and play without having to Bluebomb your machine first. They'll just have to forego the logos and seal of quality.

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