Fix Your Game Saves With...A Wii Channel?

Nintendo's stance on Internet play for its gaming devices is fairly well-known. The Japanese company just doesn't seem to get that this is a part of gaming now and only begrudgingly includes it. Heck, the 3DS was the first Nintendo device that supports WPA for wireless Net access!

Normally, this wouldn't be much of a problem. Today's console games (for the most part) have a tendency to work fine out of the box. Of course, every so often one of them has a game-breaking bug or glitch that can hinder gamers from finishing it or cause them to lose their saves. The normal method of fixing such a problem is to simply patch the game over the Internet, seeing as how most people have it nowadays. The Wii doesn't support patching (except in very rare cases like CoD4) and games with problems don't have an easy issue.

One could argue that Nintendo doesn't care that much if some people have problems with a game on their systems. Instead, they just relegate angry consumers to the developer of the game, stating it is their problem. What happens when the problem actually happens to a Nintendo product? Without the systems in place to patch a game, how would they fix things?

You may see the point I'm getting at by this time. Skyward Sword came out recently and some users have been complaining about a game-breaking glitch a decent chunk into the game. If a player does a quest in the wrong order, it won't finish, effectively stopping the game in its tracks. The only fix for this problem was to start the game over, wasting hours of progress.

If this problem wasn't on a Zelda game, they most likely wouldn't have bothered for the small number of people it might affect. Being a high-profile title like Skyward Sword put them in an awkward position. They knew they had to fix the problem in some way and it had to be possible for everyone to do.

They announced that the fix would be an unlikely source - a Wii Channel devoted to fixing game saves. By logging onto the Wii's Internet and downloading the channel, the program will run a diagnostic on saves located on the system and fix them. Afterwards, players can finish their games unabated.

This apparently only works on saves located on the system however. For people who save their data to an SD card, the only fix is to send it in to Nintendo who will fix the saves manually (sounds like a fun job, right?), a method they have used in rare occasions in the past to fix Nintendo games that broke. Either way, everyone will have a way to fix their game saves, albeit most in a faster way than others.

I'm glad to see Nintendo coming up with a solution that is more practical than just sending in the save on an SD card. It doesn't solve the problem across the board but ensures that enough people have an out if they get stuck. Let's hope for our sakes (and theirs) that they learn from this and work on a more vivid, connected network for future consoles.