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Nintendo and the Woes of Proprietary Software

Part 0: The Hardware is Shit

WELL!

make sure you have a good relationship with your second hand video

games store.

the disk that i was sold for my Wii U, Zelda: Breath of the Wild, does

not work.

apparently it is a very common issue. the only other disk that i have

to check is Super Mario 3D World, and that works fine.

i was able to get through the entire installation process with the

disk, only to be told seconds into the opening credits of the game

that the Zelda disk could not be read.

i have no means to investigate the issue further, other than hot and

cold power cycling the console, and reinstalling, which did not fix

the issue.

luckily i have micro fibre cloths, and i duly and vigorously cleaned

the disk i purchased, but it did not work. the console told me the

disk could not be read.

Part 1: The DRM is Shit

so i turned to downloading the game from the eShop. sounds simple,

right? wrong.

i had to create a SECOND account with nintendo in addition to my

NintendoID account, in order to ‘merge’ the funds i already had in my

eShop account, so i could add any funds at all, so i could purchase

the game AGAIN, except this time digitally.

i was not presented with a dialogue box asking me how much money i

wished to add to my account, in dollars and cents, i was only

presented with a ‘funny money’ interface. i could only add money in

the increments that nintendo specified.

so for a game that was AUD$89.95 online, i had to surrender AUD$100 in

order to make up the funds, because there was no other combination of

money amounts that could help me make up, roughly, AUD$90.

so i now have a weird amount of $10.05 in my account, languishing,

presumably unusable without adding MORE money.

Part 2: Funny Money is Shit

then, i was treated to their rewards program, because, i foolishly,

wanted to investigate more about whatever personal data i had

surrendered to this Multinational Corporation.

i was informed with great pomp that i had ‘earned’ 450 ‘gold coins’,

and 220 ‘platinum coins’. these ‘coins’ are not redeemable for hard

cash, they only allow one to get ‘discounts’ for online purchases—and

the only platform i was allowed to get discounts for was my 3DS. there

did not need to be any software i could access through this ‘ReWaRdS’

program for my Wii U, which is all i am interested in.

in order to keep my ‘platinum’ coins, i had to SPEND some of them to

buy a ‘coin jar’ in order to ‘hold’ them (????)

Conclusion: Nintendo is Shit

i knew my suspicion apprehension about the following that nintendo has

on the fedi was well-founded.

i was fairly dismayed to see how popular the nintendo game animal

crossing was here, and my experience with attempting to get this game

working was far too difficult.

given i had purchased nintendo hardware, the process i should have

gone through should have been one of “it just works”.

but it was no so. in addition to having to be out of pocket 10% of the

money i surrendered to nintendo, when i went to download the Zelda

game i wanted, i was duly informed that there was a phantom 4GiB of

data taking up space on my external storage, preventing me from

installing the game.

when i interrogated exactly what was taking up this space, i was told

that the external storage was holding ‘No Data’.

FURTHER: every model of the Wii U was woefully under-resourced in

terms of data storage capacity. purchasing external data storage

hardware is a necessity when it comes to being able to play more than

one game late in the console’s release cycle.

there may also be a nasty surprise for some when they come to use this

console these days: only certain types of external hard drives and USB

thumb drives work with the console—and the list of devices on the

official nintendo website is very, very short, and has not been

updated recently.

so good luck sinking more money into that.