That’s the title on the video. Here’s a link to it. (4 minutes) It’s played by “The 8-Bit Big Band,” and it’s pretty snazzy. Even if you haven’t heard the Mii Channel theme since your Wii left service, it’s a pretty popular piece of game music even now. The channel doesn’t post often, but they have a lot of bangers, relatively speaking.
Their video just before this one was a Klezmer version of Bonetrousle, Papyrus’s theme song from Undertale (5 minutes), with animation to boot, and that description is intriguing enough that I’m going to embed it here too.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
When I put it like that in the title it sounds like it’s going to be salacious but it really isn’t, it’s just anthropomorphized representations of the various enemies in Wii Play Tanks.
Okay… you don’t know what that is…. I’ll explain.
Wii Play was a mini-game collection on the Wii natch, a burgeoning genre on that system. It was an excuse to release a bunch of Wiimote experiments as an inexpensive package. As often happens with Nintendo, some of them were better than you’d expect. Three of them had some real longevity to them. Table Tennis was like a faster version of Wii Sports Tennis; Billiards was an excellent pool simulation; and then there was Tanks.
Tanks put you through a series of 20 single-screen levels where you piloted a tiny tank around destroying various other enemy tanks set around each board. As you passed level after level the game would introduce new tanks with various personalities and powers, like laying land mines, firing rocks, aiming bank shots off of walls and, eventually, invisibility.
If you were playing along you had limited lives, but it also had a two-player co-op mode, where each player only had one life, but destroyed players got revived so long as the other player survived to finish the level.
After you finished the 20-level version you unlocked a 100-level version, which threw in a couple of new tank types. There’s some nice grace notes in the design, like how the background music adds different tracks depending on which kinds of enemies are in play. It was a lot of fun, and deserves to be remembered as more than just the best game in Wii Play. Here’s a marathon playthrough of the whole thing. It’s a surprising hour and 22 minutes long, but just a couple of minutes of it will suffice to give you the idea.
Hello! John “rodneylives” Harris here. Let me quickly explain this before I get into it.
I have an overabundance of games links to present through Set Side B. My usual style of doing this is to pick one of them, then maybe write a bit of text introducing it, maybe a bit of a preview, a media embed of it’s a video somewhere (nearly always Youtube), and that’s a complete post. One a day, for approaching four years now. (SSB launched on April 5th, 2022.)
But working this way, I’ve developed quite a backlog! Not all of them are really worthy of a whole post, maybe, or I don’t have a full post’s worth of context to coax out of it.
So in an effort to clean up my link collections, I think I’m going to make regular posts, maybe one a week, that’s just several things that might be interesting. I post them, my link folder get slightly shorter, each individual person might be interested in one or two items in it each, then we move on to more of the usual kind of thing the rest of the week.
2. On Mastodon, there’s an account, @everybodyvotes@social,miyaku.media, that posts every poll published on the Wii’s “Everybody Votes” channel, back in the days when Nintendo would do fun, free things just for the sake of doing them. You can even vote on them again, using Mastodon’s polling feature.
3. On Balatro creator LocalThunk’s blog, they’ve published a timeline of its history, from original concept to launch, whereupon LocalThunk earned more money than he had ever had before in their entire life.
Primm made a number of high resolution images of the system cursors the Wii uses, for use as desktop cursors on Windows, macOS and Linux, and in four colors corresponding to the four player Wii remotes. You can get them here!
Nintendo has a habit of, with each new console, throwing a bunch of features at the wall to see what’ll stick. Most things, let’s be frank, don’t.
Top of my head? The DS’s second screen? It worked for a while, but now seems pretty well an abandoned idea. The 3D features of the 3DS. StreetPass. AR games. Their brief experiments with free-to-play on the 3DS. The whole darn Virtual Boy. Need I go on?
One of these features was the idea of system-supported services that software could use to interact with the player outside of borders of their channel. Miis were the finest example of this, of course, and amazingly Nintendo hasn’t abandoned them yet, although ideas like Miis that could travel between systems on their own have been conveniently forgotten.
But on the Wii, there were a few less publicized things that games could do. Super Mario Galaxy and its sequel were known to send you messages on the system bulletin board to congratulate you on winning, or to give you hints of Stars to find.
About a year ago GVG did a recounting of Wii games that used, of all things, data from the Weather Forecast Channel. They pinned down nine pieces of software that did this. It’s a feature that Peter Molyneux notably abandoned when he directed Black & White (after announcing it), but Nintendo actually did it. Here is the video, which is a fairly padded 9½ minutes:
The title says nine games used it, but the channel only lists seven, and not all of them are even games! The software named:
Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games (could be enabled in Options)
Nights: Journey Into Dreams (in the Nightopian garden)
Mat Sephton, aka gingerbeardman (Mastodon, Bluesky), creator of a GotY Playdate game, spent some time tracking down the origins of MaBoShi, aka Maboshi’s Arcade, one of the most unique and distinctive independently-made WiiWare games. He blogged about it back in 2013 (anna anthropydid so too back then). Since then there have been DS and iOS remakes of the games, although they all lack a special gimmick of the WiiWare version.
(Aside: did you know that I believe very strongly in the power of hyperlinks? You should too!)
The arcade hosts three games, and they all would have been terrific on their own. My favorite is the Snake variant, a genuinely novel take on the concept and the one I’ve gotten the furthest in. But the cool thing about the Wii version is that up to three players can play at one. Each plays their own games and has independent progression, but intriguingly, their games are not entirely separate. Things that one player does in their game can affect, either positively or negatively, the events in adjacent games. Even if you don’t play with other people, random attract mode games will start up on adjacent screens, and provide a bit of variety to your game.
All three games are demonstrated, on Wii, in the following video (18m). Just watching it makes me want to dig out the Wii U where my own bought copy of the game lives and play another round of Square.
Fact: even after the disastrous life of the Wii-U, Miis still exist on the Nintendo Switch, and even though a lot less fuss is made about them now, there are still games that support them.
There are also games that used to support them but no longer do. The version of Super Mario Galaxy on Super Mario 3D All-Stars doesn’t let you select a system Mii to use as the file icon. You’re limited to one of the Mario characters provided! It’s a shame that. But, Nintendo Switch Sports, Smash Ultimate, and of course Miitopia supports them, as do four other games on the platform.
I’ve actually been through the process explained in the below video, by CJCat, which involves using Amiibo to transfer Miis over one by one from a Wii-U that had a Mii collection brought over using the Wii import channel. We played a lot of Wii, and it’s nice to know all the goofy characters we made, and the memories they carry, are on the Switch, even if few games use them any more. I hope the Switch 2 doesn’t forget about them, and that it makes them easier to bring over!
An internal Nintendo metaphor for the Wii’s UI was “more channels for the TV.” It’s a particularly Old Dad idea for the Wii really, as even at that time broadcast TV was beginning to decline in popularity, but it may have made more sense in Nintendo’s home territory.
The experiences of these channels, the Mii Channel, the News Channel, the Weather Channel, the Shop Channel and the like, are receding in memory, although there are fan efforts to revive them and connect them to new information sources. But at the other end of their development life, of their pre-release development very little has ever been known. Early Wiis had stubs in their place, that only directed the user to installing a launch-day update. (I experienced this myself! I drove 140 miles in order to wait in a line for a Wii on its launch day, November 19, 2006. I’m objectively insane.)
Those stubs weren’t the true original versions of the Wii Channels, they had been in development within Nintendo for some time. Those development versions of the Wii software have never been leaked outside the company, but there exists footage of them from various sources. Bjohn on Youtube has compiled what we know about the development Wii Channels into a 21-minute video. Here it is:
There’s a fair amount there, including early versions of the Internet Channel and early evidence of plans to include DVD support. (The Wii has a fully-operational DVD drive, but to avoid playing a license fee to the DVD Consortium it cannot play DVDs without hacks.)
By that title, I don’t mean the capabilities of the Wii title called Wii Music*. The video below, from Dublincalif, is about the properties of the Wii’s sound system itself. It’s 24 minutes, but pretty interesting for all that, and it’s presented really well. It’s a model explainer video, and a great first effort in that style from its maker!
You might think that all the music on the Wii is just streamed, either from audio tracks or files, but it isn’t. The Wii has fairly little NAND storage, and music is a major consumer of storage space, so a lot of its music is sequenced, essentially MIDI files played with sample banks, with optional effects added. The video is a great overview of its features and capabilities.
* Of random interest: Wii Music’s data is amazingly small! Of that 4.7GB DVD it resides on, it uses less than 10 MB!
