Added Captain Toad to the list.
Got a little excited and forgot to take a photo before I opened stuff
I don’t even like physical Wii U games or Star Fox but this was really cheap on Nintendo’s online store.
A while back I managed to get a Japanese Wii U with gamepad for a mere $38 CAD. I intended to use this as a backup gamepad and maybe backup system.
However of course the Wii U gamepad is region locked. So you can’t just use a Japanese gamepad on a US region console.
Right?
Well if you try to sync it the proper way, using the button on the system, it’ll sync but you’ll get an error about the Wii U Gamepad needing an update. Dead end.
But, if you have a hacked Wii U, you can install “System Config Tool,” an app intended for debug Wii Us. In there you can break a lot of things on your Wii U so be careful but under “Wii U GamePad (DRC) Settings” you can sync gamepads. Doesn’t seem like it’d be very useful but if you sync an out of region gamepad in here, you won’t get prompted about a gamepad update and can bypass the region lock entirely.
Here’s my white JP gamepad sync’d to my US region Zelda black Wii U:
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Region locked pads pfffft didn’t they do that with Super Famicom pads and early PAL Snes consoles too?
Great that you found a way around it.
White Wii U looks so cool. I am a bit jealous.
Good on you for owning Pikmin 3 by the way. Great game that is criminally overlooked.
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I just started chipping away at that game again it is fantastic! I believe I’m on day 35 or something, just rescued Louie. I recall receiving the game as a Club Nintendo reward or maybe a digital system pack-in
Best Wii U game.
I also consider Pikmin 2 the best GC game.
Love my Wii U. Whenever we have friends over, we still fire up Game and Wario to play Sketch. Some of our friends aren’t into gaming as much as my gf and I, but everyone has a blast with Sketch. It’s hilarious.
Today I realized that much as I love my Switch, for some strange reason, I still love my Wii U just a bit more. It has this weird charm that all of Nintendo’s systems have had in the Satoru Iwata era that is sort of absent on the Switch with its sterile (albeit snappy) UI and complete lack of social features.
Nintendo was really misunderstood. Of course, their problems are their own doing. But I really thought they were onto some cool ideas that are now left behind.
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I love them both. I definitely miss the Miiverse and I actually had a lot of fun with Nintendo TVii, which most people probably never even tried. People simply didn’t understand anything that the Wii U was trying to do, or didn’t want it. You can easily see why they’ve dumped all of that for super stripped down UI now.
I’m looking to pair down my game collection outside of my Saturn library and Wii U stuff. I’ll never part with it. It’s not necessarily my favourite piece of Nintendo hardware, but it is definitely one of the most fascinating to me. I acquired most of my hardware and library while working in games media, so I have some unique digital versions of games that were for review purposes. My biggest gripe is that the game pad looks and feels like it was made by Fisher-Price.
I actually think the Gamepad is pretty cool. It’s not a tablet, but I never evaluated it as one. It’s a cool looking controller.
My issues are with the build quality and feel. It feels cheap. There is an audible rattle where the buttons jiggle. The screen feels exposed.
I think the Wii U will be a console that grows in popularity over the years as people back off the irrational hate and begin to acknowledge what it had to offer.
That icon never did anything here in NZ… what was the TVii thing like?
Nothing too special. It just was a TV guide type thing.
You could also see a few stats in sports games.
I think it’s pretty well accepted that it will be very collectible and looked upon favorably by enthusiasts in the future. If for no other reason than the game pad. You can’t easily emulate that experience.
I don’t own one, and never have, but I am open to snagging it one day. But any small desire I might have to get drops a bit with each Switch port.
I don’t think it made it to Europe?
Nintendo Land’s Donkey Kong Crash Course was worth the price of my Wii U alone. Here is my best run.
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I never managed to beat it.
Also, holy crap! Never knew you could sequence break it like that.
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It was pretty cool, but never reached the full potential of their plan I think. What I really enjoyed was while watching NFL Football on a Sunday, you could have that game up on your Wii U and it would go play by play with the game on the TV, asking occasionally something like “Will this be a running or passing play?” and you’d choose what you thought. It actually kept a tally of your correct answers and gave a “winner” at the end of the game. There was also chat built in there for people to talk about the game as it happened. It was fun!
I’m sure few people looked into that stuff while it was up and running, and Nintendo didn’t really go out of their way to promote it. At the time, it definitely predated the shitshow that is Twitter during a game where pretty much anything goes now but there’s no real focused way for fans to enjoy a game together other than I guess via hashtags?
I didn’t watch films this way or anything, but I’m pretty sure there was some similar functionality there too. You can find some videos of how TVii worked on YouTube although I wasn’t very impressed by the ones I found. I wish I had been able to record it back then and show people how it worked. And yeah, it may have been US-centric for the most part. It was also synced up with my cable provider (Comcast) so the listings were right in there. As all of you probably know, you can use the Wii U’s Gamepad as a TV remote, and a pretty full featured one at that.
Nintendo were ahead of the times with the Gamepad but at the same time people went out of their way to not understand it. It was continued backlash against the success of Wii IMO. I think there’s still lingering resentment of Nintendo that is holding Switch back a little bit too.
@matt… DKCrash Course is incredible. Man, I totally forgot how cool that was! I need to play again. Nintendoland as a whole was just amazing. We got hours and hours out of that game.