ow-wii

January 6, 2008 under Gaming, Nintendo, Wii

I’ve heard about it. I’ve read about it. Lo and behold, it happened to me.

On Friday evening before venturing to the airport to get Dena, I decided to pass the time by trying to make some progress with Metroid Prime 3. After an hour or so, I began to hear a loud buzzing noise. I was in new (to me) areas of Sky City so I thought it was part of the sound effects…until I heard the same sound on the map screen. I turned off my TV to rule out a problem with it, and sure enough, the sound remained. It was the Wii. To troubleshoot, I went back to the Wii Menu: no buzzing noise. I popped trusty Wii Sports: no buzzing noise. Guitar Hero 3: buzzing Noise. Metroid Prime 3: buzzing noise. It concerned me, but not all that much.

Then yesterday, while playing Metroid Prime 3 again (and defeating Ghor, for those interested), I noticed “sparkly” pixels when ever Samus entered a Save point or her ship. I backed out to the Wii Menu and the “sparkly” pixels were there too. After poking around the Web a bit, I found a video of someone playing Resident Evil 4 with the same problem that I was having:

http://www.youtube.com/v/Zrrj4eoxQ1o&rel=1

I called Nintendo Support today and have shipped my Wii off to Nintendo of Canada in Scarborough for repair, or rather more likely a replacement with my save data copied over (I backed up my save data to an SD card just in case). Of course this is all covered under warranty. When I was filling out the Purolator waybiil today, the clerk asked me if it was an X-Box 360 that I was sending away for repair since, as she said, “we see that a lot”. I had to hang my head a little bit when I replied that it was a Wii that I bought back in April 2007.

The Internet consensus is that this problem is caused by overheating. I keep my Wii in a cabinet, but there are 20 centimetres of spaces on each side and the back is open. I’d hate to think it needs more room than that, but perhaps it does. One thing I did notice is how warm the Wii would get while it’s on Standby with WiiConnect24 enabled. My plan is that when my Wii returns, I’ll disable WiiConnect24 as a precaution. I’ll miss waking up to the glowing blue light when ever there’s a new message or system update, but I’d rather not have to send my Wii off for repairs again.

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