I’m Upset With Nintendo Again Because They Stole 80 Hours of My Life

So the title of this sounds like I could be making some sort of crack at how great Skyward Sword is and how it “stole” 80 hours of my life. I’m not. I’m finally, legitimately upset at Nintendo because of how they handled the development of the Wii and its basic hardware structure. It took 5 years, but one small issue on top of another small issue on top of another has finally taken it’s toll, and I’m ready to say it: The Wii is an outdated piece of crap with fantastic games. Unfortunately, despite the fantastic games, the first part has now become inexcusable.

So, a little backstory? A lot of you know that since my Wii went on a breaking spree about 7 or 8 months ago, I’ve been unable to play games on it. It’ll still load up digital downloads, but physical disks are apparently too much for it to handle, and until last month I neglected to bother buying a new one. Well, I finally got a brand new console. A brand new stinkin’ console to replace one that broke for absolutely no reason, and that’s fine. I get it. Things break. I won’t make Nintendo pay for a new Wii for me just because some one in a million hardware malfunction happened to rear its head.

That’s not what upset me. What upset me is what happened to me half an hour ago.

See, one of the biggest reasons I got another Wii is because I wanted to play online with you guys again. Monster Hunter Tri, in particular, gave me nearly 100 hours of pure enjoyment, and I never even made it passed level 15 online. I had a long way to go, and I was exceedingly excited to finally be able to pick the game up again right where I left off and enjoy all of the great things I’ve accumulated.

So, I turned on my broken Wii, inserted an SD card, and prepared to get all of my great save data back. It’s not the smoothest or fastest process on the planet, but hey, it’ll do for now. It wasn’t until I tried to transfer my data for Goldeneye that I was a little thrown off. Both the “Copy” and “Move” functions were greyed out, and I began to suspect something was wrong with my SD card. I removed it, put it back in, checked to see that it showed up, and then went back to the save data transfer screen. Still nothing. Goldeneye wouldn’t transfer.

I tried Mario Galaxy and it worked.

I tried Resident Evil 4 and it worked.

But Goldeneye? Nope. Not gonna happen. So I gave up on it and decided to get to the cream of the crop: Monster Hunter Tri. All 80 hours of my great progress with friends would soon be mine, and I could get right back to beating the daylights out of giant dragons with them! But of course, you can guess where this is going. It wouldn’t transfer either. I was, needless to say, upset.

After a bit of Googling and some detective work, I discovered a rather inexcusable feature of the Wii: You can’t transfer save data if the game you want to play has Wifi capabilities. No The Conduit, no Monster Hunter, no Goldeneye, no Mario Kart; nothing. None of those games will allow their save data to be moved, and I find that troubling. Why? Because I didn’t break my Wii. Nintendo broke my Wii.

It would be one thing if they said “Hey, you have to keep all of the save data on one console, but that’s okay because you’ll never need to transfer it anyway!”. I would get that. I could just keep playing on the Wii that I first played on, and things would be peachy and we’d move on.

That’s not how it is though. It never is.

I bought, for $250, a console from Nintendo that I rightfully expected to work for at least 10 years as long as I didn’t throw it off a roof or run over it with a semi. My NES from 1989 still functions. My N64 from 1998 still works. The Gamecube I have is good to go whenever I want it. All of my Gameboys. Even my Nintendo DS that got thrown full force against a rock hard wall still functions as good as it ever has. Hell, even my Atari 2600 from the 1970s still functions almost as good as it did when we first bought it.

But not my Wii. I’ve hear of a few people’s Wiis breaking, and honestly, that is totally fine. I have no problem with a company saying “Hey look, this might only last four years. You’ll have to pick up another one then.” After all, you pay more for cable in a year than it costs to buy a Wii that’ll last probably more than five. But if they’re saying “This is only going to work for four years” (and they are saying that given that the warranty only lasts four years), they should also recognize that they need to make things easy on those of us who do have to buy a new one.

Let us re-download our digital games. Let us move our save data. Let us plug-n-play like things never even broke. It’s inexcusable to me that they’ve left out a feature that couldn’t have been very hard to fix, and now I have to go spend 100 more hours getting back to where I was not only in Monster Hunter, but in games like Goldeneye and Mario Kart.

Though, I probably just won’t play them again then. My loss, Nintendo.