If you're a lawyer for Nintendo and your spidey senses are tingling, we may have an explanation. "Wii Backup Loader" is exactly what this (highly convincing) video suggests: a program which allows the Wii to play DVD game backups, in the form of modified ISOs. It runs from the Wii Homebrew Channel.
News of the program broke from the forums at tehskeen (note: we've linked to a related article due to tehskeen being down), though we'd expect this to hit peer-to-peer networks in the not-too-distant future, if it hasn't already. Just remember, kids: winners don't do piracy.
Illegal as this may be, there's plenty of other very cool and very legal things you can do through homebrew. Care to watch DVD movies on your console? How about some original games, like Masteroids or the shmup OpenTyrian? And it doesn't stop there. Our own Mike Sylvester also likes to see what he can come up with in his bi-weekly column Revolutionary.
How many times in your history as a gamer have you felt that your console's controller couldn't be any better? Every time I've gotten my hands on a new game controller, there's been something I wished could be different. The NES controller could have been rounder. The SNES controller could have used some more face buttons for Street Fighter. The N64 controller needed speedier room service.
The Wii controller is built with expansion, flexibility, and upgrades in mind, and with the addition of a third party accessory, I've been able to mate the Wiimote with the Classic Controller to form a Voltronic gestalt of a controller that should be capable of great things. But is it perfect?
Apparently, there's a secret recovery mode within the Wii that can be accessed through a special GameCube memory card. What's the significance of this? Well, don't you read post titles? It allows the system to play back-ups.
There isn't much in the way of information regarding the process right now, but the deal seems to be that when this GameCube memory card is inserted into the system, with a unique ID signature present, it takes the Wii into recovery mode, allowing the user to run basically anything. We'll update you all with more information as it's made available.
Update: It appears the recovery mode is only good for fixing "certain bricked consoles." Oh well ...
The homebrew community is the best. Not only have they allowed us to do things that we never thought possible on the Wii (like play GoldenEye 007 and watch our favorite movies), but now they're hard at work coming up with ways for us to enjoy classic point-and-click adventure games on the platform. While we won't be able to, say, play Sam & Max Hit the Road yet, the current release (version 0.12.0) has support for 5 games. These include:
The Legend of Kyrandia: Book Two: Hand of Fate
The Legend of Kyrandia: Book Three: Malcolm's Revenge
Lost in Time
The Bizarre Adventures of Woodruff and the Schnibble
Drascula: The Vampire Strikes Back
Sure, it's no Secret of Monkey Island or anything, but progress is being made so that we need not rely entirely upon Telltale for our point-and-click fix. We're excited for a future where we can enjoy all of those classics on our Wii.
If, like us, you spent hours gawking at Pocket Physics on the DS (or Crayon Physics, its predecessor on the PC), you'll know that it's one of the most time-consuming homebrew titles on the handheld. Sooner or later, it was inevitable that the homebrew community would spawn a Wii version, and homebrewer Beardface has answered the call with WiiPhysics. The video above is version 2.1 of the title, though it has since enjoyed a slight update, adding a two-player mode. Download it here!
In the year 1997, with Sylvester Stallone's Demolition Man still fairly fresh on our minds, developer Shiny took the opportunity to name one of their games after an abbreviated phrase that was mentioned several times in that film. Under the assumption that MDK stood for "Murder, Death, Kill" and the fact that you run around as a guy whose head is a sniper rifle, the Playstation generation couldn't wait to get their hands on it. As it turned out, the game was not the gruesome murder simulator many people expected, but a humorously quirky action title like most of the prior games Shiny was known for. In the sequel, the main character from the first game, Kurt Hectic, would share the duty of saving the earth with Doctor Fluke Hawkins and the four-armed, gun-toting, cigar-chomping robotic dog, Max, the other members of the game's titular trio. It's the crazy sort of stuff that keeps gaming fresh, and with its recently-announced comeback in the making, I can think of no better place for the franchise to make a killing than on the Wii.
We had two questions upon watching this footage of a Roomba being controlled by a Balance Board:
What the heck is a Roomba?
Why?
Google answered the first for us -- apparently it's a robotic vacuum cleaner or something, which we now want -- while the second is explained to us by hacker "Ron" Tajima. Through endearing Engrish subtitles, we learn that Ron has a dilemma: he wants to surf, but also needs to clean his floors. Hey, happens all the time to us. His solution? Hack the Balance Board so that it controls his Roomba, allowing him to "surf" the Board while also vacuum cleaning his way to lint-free carpets.
We especially like how "Surfin' USA" is played in the background while Ron wobbles away, just to make it really feel like actual surfing.
Gallery: Peripherals that paved the way for the Balance Board
Going outside? Let the common man do that, as tech-savvy folks can just navigate the outside world within the comfort of their own home, with little more than a Balance Board and Google Street View. It's kind of similar to the Google Earth thing we presented back in May. In the least, it's got to be a cheap and easy way to travel to those cities you always wanted to visit, but couldn't afford to go to.
The homebrew community has been hard at work creating wonderful experiences for you to enjoy with your Wii. Did you know about homebrew game Masteroids? Or how about the shmup OpenTyrian? Outside of games, people have been using the Balance Board to come up with somereally neat stuff. Also, if you wanna watch movies on your Wii, be sure to check out our step-by-step guide. Keep up with the homebrew scene by staying current with our Homebrew category!
In a bid to get his Wiimote-compatible music software Wii Loop Machine out on the market, Yann Seznec pursued funding from an unlikely source: popular BBC show Dragon's Den. For the uninitiated, Dragon's Den follows a similar concept to American Inventor -- hopeful entrepreneurs line up in front of unimaginably rich businessmen and beg for funding to assist their zany ideas, while we smugly laugh at their expense from the comfort of our armchairs.
Those of you in the UK who caught last night's edition of Dragon's Den may well have spotted the affable Yann selling his software to the miserable millionaires. Alas, like so many of the show's participants, Yann's excellent work didn't grab the imaginations of the dragons, though they did seem to acknowledge its potential. "I've got to give you credit," quipped businessman Peter Jones after watching Seznec waft his Wiimotes about to demo the software, "You look like a complete idiot, but actually, it sounded quite good." Charming.
[Update: YouTube video added, thanks Mouthsmasher!]
A group called "Destiny Revival" is honoring the dormant Sailor Moon franchise by creating five Sailor Moon brawlers created in the free Beats of Rage engine. Two are available so far, and now the group is branching out and tempting widespread attention (and thus lawsuits from Toei) with the announcement of the development of a Wii homebrew Sailor Moon game.
In a Sailor Moon Forum post, developer kungpow12345 unveiled the first screens of Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, a new game done in the style of the Super FamicomSailor Moon games. Even if you're not particularly interested in fighting evil by moonlight and winning love by daylight, it's a homebrew brawler for the Wii, and that is excellent. kungpow12345 is hoping to have a playable version of Pretty Guardian ready for next year's Otakon in July.
When the news broke yesterday about the Mplayer homebrew application, we were quick to try it out for ourselves. Surprisingly, it wasn't that hard and before you knew it, we were enjoying the Battlestar Galactica DVD you see above. But what about you all? Did you check it out for yourself? Let your voice be heard in our poll past the break.
So, you want to watch your favorite movie or television show on your Wii? It's not as hard as you would think! Thanks to the recent developments in the homebrew community, you only need a few simple files and you're ready to rock some DVDs on your console. So, without further delay, let's get you started!
Homebrewer Erant has created a program that allows the Wii to read DVDs. It comes bundled with a media player program that lets you play DVD movies as well as view video files stored on an SD card, without any hardware modifications. You still need to be able to run homebrew on your Wii, but that's done easily enough.
The commenters in the announcement post seem to be having mixed success with the program, with results ranging from, at best "Excellent! Works like a charm." to "It doesn't seem to play DVDs on my Wii," to the worst possible outcome, "watching Hackers (1995) right now."
As a sort of proof of concept of the new DVD-reading capability for uses other than video, a patch will soon be available for Nintendo 64 emulator Wii64 to allow ROMs to be read from DVDs.
The creators of the sometimes NSFW (and also amusing) webcomic The Least I Could Do (and also, Looking for Group) have ventured into new territory: parody Mario Bros. games. Or rather, game, singular ... or, if you want to be very specific, Super Rayne's World.
The first level is currently available, and it's a good and silly mix of traditional Mario-esque gameplay, with all the staples replaced by cameos of characters and themes from the comic. For fans of the comic, the choices make hilarious sense; no one else could parody a Piranha Plant the way they do. Forget fireballs, too; here, you're hurling bottles of tequila. Guess that's a little more tasteful than some other things they could have chosen, considering Rayne's proclivities. Not a fan of the comic? Let's just say the main character's favorite anecdote involves that time he bought a horse a prostitute.
While it's still in the early stages, the game serves as a nice diversion, and could actually develop into something fun, particularly for Rayne's devotees. Check out a couple of screens from the level after the break.
Yesterday's jaw-droppingly comprehensive Wii Menu hack, which enables cross-region Wii, Gamecube, and downloadable games, as well as various display and UI tweaks, was unavailable to the public when the video (encore presentation above!) was released. But today creator Crediar has released the files for use on your own Wii.
We're very interested in opening up our Wii systems, but at the same time, we're ... going to hold off until we hear some feedback about this. Something as drastic as this HackInstaller seems like it could carry a high risk of Wii brickage. If it ends up being a Wii killer, we're sure we'll hear about it in the next week or so.
Illegal as this may be, there's plenty of other very cool and very legal things you can do through homebrew. Care to watch DVD movies on your console? How about some original games, like Masteroids or the shmup OpenTyrian? And it doesn't stop there. Our own Mike Sylvester also likes to see what he can come up with in his bi-weekly column Revolutionary.
