Wii Archive

Just about wrapped up with getting all the Japanese Wii VC and Wii Ware games we might ever need in the next 10 years. Some of the game descriptions come with icons as warnings of the game’s contents. The icons for the scary school stories game is loaded with dreadful things:

I do like the ghost icon they use for horror games :3

Moving on to the American Wii pretty soon…

Nintendo’s Wii Shop is leaving us soon. Next Monday is the last day you can buy Wii Shop points, and the Shop closes entirely in January 2019. Time is running out to preserve all those Wii-exclusive digital games before they disappear (possibly forever), so here I go!

Except Nintendo doesn’t make it easy to buy games on the Wii Shop. I’ve run into lots of little problems along the way:

• You have to buy “points” first, you can’t use money to directly buy a game.
• You can only buy up to 3,000 (about $28) points at a time.
• You can’t buy more than 10,000 points. You gotta spend your points before buying more.
• None of the games are priced at round numbers. It’s always something like 512 points so you’ll inevitably waste money.
• You can only buy one game at a time, and then download one game at a time. There’s no download queue.
• You have to scroll through the game list every time. They don’t save your place.
• If you buy a lot of points, your credit card will get flagged for suspicious activity (yeah, this happened to me).

I’ve bought games through Nintendo’s eShop on the Switch and it’s a big improvement, though it could still be better. I don’t think anyone will really miss the Wii Shop once it’s gone. Well, except for video game historians.