I ‘Hacked’ my Wii

I bought a Nintendo Wii about 6 years ago after playing Wii bowling at a friends. It seemed like a nice thing to have when people come over. You could bowl, shoot arrows even shuffleboard if I remember correctly…plus all of the Mario games! Of course after a few months I was bowled out, then got a house, so the Wii found itself in a box for the next 5 years. Then nostalgia struck.

After reading ‘Ready Player One’ last year, which contains nothing but 80’s movie and video game references and is one of my new favorite books, I have been feeling a bit nostalgic for the decade I mostly grew up in. I had been watching some old 80’s movies and one of them was ‘The Last Star Fighter’ which a video game is used to help recruit trailer park resident, Alex Rogan to be a real interplanetary ‘Star Fighter’ for his skills on the sticks. That got me thinking about all of the old video games I used to play as well as one I never played…Zelda. I have never played any Zelda game, as good as it was supposed to be. I have no idea why, but I had always wished I was excited about it as other people seemed to be.

I came across a poll that voted Zelda the most important video game…ever. It even beat out Metroid, my personal childhood favorite. After Robin Williams passed away, I learned that his daughter was named Zelda. What? I even came across a parked car with the license plate of ‘Hyrule’, the land of Zelda, a few weeks ago. I should probably play Zelda.

How to Play on Your Wii

How am I going to play these games that were meant to be played on systems that don’t exist anymore? Apparently, soft modding with The Homebrew Channel was the answer. What soft modding is, is adding software to your Wii via an SD card that other brilliant people have programmed to play games from Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Gameboy, Gamecube etc. You can install emulators that ‘emulate’ the old Nintendo systems and then download the ROMS to load into the emulator. This is done all via the Wii. They have SD slots in the front, so it almost seems like the Wii was designed for something like this. My Wii is even backwards compatible with the Gamecube (joystick ports on top). I had tried this ‘soft-modding’ about the same time I bought the Wii 6 years prior, but with no luck. Apparently you can also ruin the Wii by soft modding it. Having just bought it, I didn’t want to immediately break it. Six years later, I was ready to try it or break it…and long story short, I got it to work. It took days, so when I finally saw the Nintendo logo pop up from 1986 I was floored. Success.

I downloaded a few of my favorites from childhood and loaded them all one by one just to take a look. Metroid, Excitebike, Battletoads, Double Dragon and Mortal Kombat had all been loaded up. Like a kid again.

So I am now playing Zelda – A Link to the Past for the first time and am digging everything about it. The music is great, the puzzles are tricky and the game is frustratingly hard at times. The graphics are out of date of course, yet full of retro charm. It’s cool to see what we used to play opposed to the near life like details in today’s consoles. The Wii is out of retirement for a bit and may be so for the foreseeable future for there is much to be done here! Isn’t it still hip to be square?