Okay, okay, I know what you're thinking…where was Part 1? Well, enough people had to send in their Wii's due to the Brawl problem, so a lot of you experienced "Part 1" for yourselves. Sadly, in my case, the Wii woes continue (Wii woes…heheh). It all started the day after I got my Wii back from Nintendo. It was at the end of a marathon Subspace Emissary session. I'd just finished unlocking all the characters in Brawl, and decided to call it a night. I hit the Home button on my Classic Controller, selected "Wii Menu", and waited. But to my bewilderment, nothing happened. Just a black screen. After a couple of minutes, I decided that something was up, and turned off my Wii manually, as the Power button on the Wii Remote didn't seem to want to turn off my system. Upon trying to turn the Wii back on, I was greeted with nothing but a black screen after the "Health and Safety" warning screen. This persisted for a while, and eventually the Wii Menu finally came up, after several tries.
Now, fast forward to yesterday. After exiting Brawl, once again the Wii Menu refused to come up. A couple of manual restarts took care of this, but that's when all hell broke loose. I went into the Wii Options menu, to turn off the WiiConnect24 Standby Connection (I hate leaving it on), and upon exiting back to the Wii Menu…BAM, black screen. Manual restarts. Wii Menu finally comes back up. Try to access a random VC game, and everything above the Wii Menu/Start buttons is black. I back out, and select another VC game. I don't even get that far this time, as the Wii locks up. Another restart. I click on the Shop Channel icon, and the screen fades to black, with a message that "The Wii System Files are corrupt". Wow.
Now, I never had any problems like this before sending my Wii in to Nintendo for the Brawl issue. Not that I'm blaming Nintendo, but it does seem a bit odd that I should start to have problems now, right after getting my Wii back. At least Nintendo was kind enough to extend my warranty for another year after I sent my Wii in the first time, so this isn't costing me anything.
Or is it?
See, not being content with just throwing my Wii into a box with some crumpled up newspaper, I took my Wii to a local packing place, and had it professionally packed. Which cost me around $8. And I'll have to do it again this time, as well. Another $8, down the drain. Sure, it's not much, but when you live on a budget as small as mine, every little bit counts. Why can't Nintendo send me a box to ship my Wii in, instead of just giving me a shipping label? At least Microsoft has the courtesy to send a "coffin" when someone's 360 breaks. Sure, I don't have to pay to get my Wii packed up all nice, but I like to know that my Wii will reach Nintendo in the same condition I sent it in (ie: broken, but still in one piece).
So, I'm facing yet another two or three Wii-less weeks (heheh…Wii-less weeks). A disheartening proposition, to be sure. I suppose I'll have to postpone any further adventures into Neuro Tower, as well as any further excursions into Santa Destroy. But at the very least, I have a PS2, Dreamcast, and DS to keep me occupied in the meantime. Well, more to the point, I have my sister's DS. What happened to mine, you say? Well, it broke. Right hinge popped off. You know, THAT problem. And by the time it happened to me, not only was my DS out of warranty, but Nintendo had flipped on it's policy and decided that the hinge problem was indeed the user's fault. Which means it'd cost me $80 to get it fixed. But I won't go into that here. This is about the Wii, not the DS. And to all of you out there who have never had a problem with your Wii, consider yourselves lucky that you don't have to go through this whole process. It's not fun at all.
Images courtesy of Nintendo.
