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New Wii Menu Update Targets Homebrew Again
Nintendo has tried to block homebrew during firmware updates in the past, often unsuccessfully. Now, as it rolls out version 4.3 of the Wii System Menu, stopping homebrew modifications once again seems to be its primary goal. From Nintendo's support site: "Because unauthorized channels or firmware may impair game play or the Wii console, updating to Wii Menu version 4.3 will check for and automatically remove such unauthorized files." Since it's hard to bill that as an upgrade, they vaguely add, "In addition, there are some behind the scenes enhancements that do not affect any prominently-used features or menus but will improve system performance."
Sony did a bit of Indian-giving Nintendo did not.
Why do Americans say "Indian giving" for this sort of behaviour? Didn't the Europeans take the whole country away from the indigenous population, signing and then breaking many treaties in the process?
Surely it should be called "European treaty breaking"?
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Say I have friends visiting my home and we end up wanting to play a video game. But either A. they don't all own a PC, instead commonly using a PC belonging to another household member, B. they didn't all bring PCs because they didn't know in advance that they were going to want to play a video game, or C. they all brought PCs but it turns out that there isn't any game that all four of us have. Now how do we play video games together? With a Wii console, we can trade discs back and forth to practice games and then play the games together on a shared screen because unlike PC game developers and some PS3/360 game developers, Wii game developers haven't yet succumbed to the mentality of requiring one system per player. A lot of you don't like split screens, but Tetris splits a screen without the issues commonly seen in first-person shooters, and Bomberman and Smash Bros. are good examples of how to share a screen without a split at all.
The Wii has never been sold at a loss... To Nintendo a Wii sold for purposes of running homebrew is still a profit that they wouldn't have got otherwise.
Having a modded wii also makes playing legitimate games easier, for instance you can install USBLoaderGX and copy games to a usb drive and play from there, far more convenient than dealing with discs.
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That's a silly comparison, it's more akin to if sony were to remove the other OS feature from the PS3 (no, wait, they did that already)
Also a silly comparison Wii never advertised the Homebrew channel and never intended it to be a feature whereas the OtherOS was actually a feature out of the box.