Japanese WiiWare titles pirated on U.S. Wiis

by Kyle Orland { May 5th 2008 at 4:55PM }

For those readers who just can't wait one more week for the U.S. launch of WiiWare, Twilight Hackers have now made it possible to illegally install downloaded Japanese WiiWare titles on North American Wiis. The below video shows how a WAD installer can be used to extract game data from an SD card and install it to show up on the Wii's Channel Menu, just like a normal, legally downloaded game.

While playing Tetris and Pong on your Wii is one thing, playing pirated WiiWare games is another thing entirely -- a thing that could cost Nintendo a lot of money, to be specific. We have to wonder how long the company can turn a blind eye to this hole in its system security now that it has the potential to impact an extremely profitable part of its business.

[Via Nintendo Wii Fanboy]

Tags: twilight-hack, twilight-princess-hack, wii, wiiware

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

GI-Joe @ May 5th 2008 5:02PM

Freakin' awsome cat. More lolcats please.

ill trooper @ May 5th 2008 7:30PM

LOLcats: "I can haz shark-jump?"

Roto13 @ May 5th 2008 5:07PM

I think this kind of crosses a line for Nintendo. This is probably when they finally step in and update the hell out of this stuff. :P

Chris @ May 5th 2008 5:10PM

Say bye bye to homebrew.

Gewurztraminer says: R.O.B. is the last Cylon! @ May 5th 2008 5:10PM

"Bloody pirates!"

Vidikron (FU) @ May 5th 2008 5:14PM

How is this any different or more damaging than the fact people already pirate full retail Wii and DS games in droves? Both systems are selling cheaply produced games and overpriced hardware by the truck load. I'm pretty sure they'll survive Wii Ware titles being pirated.

PhrawzT @ May 5th 2008 5:19PM

I don't really care about modding my Wii, but this is interesting if I can play Japanese Wii Ware games that may not make it to the US.

Skippy @ May 5th 2008 6:51PM

Nintendo is much more likely to crack down on this hack because it doesn't require hardware modifications to the Wii. Anyone could do it basically which makes it far more likely to end up being very widespread if they don't squash it.

Vidikron (FU) @ May 5th 2008 8:23PM

I think it's still beyond what your average Wii consumer is going to do. In fact, I'd bet that most Wii consumers are utterly unaware of a hack like this.

Jody Anthony (cookingrebels.com) @ May 5th 2008 5:15PM

this kind of stuff is what gives homebrew a bad name.

Grog @ May 5th 2008 5:54PM

Exactly. "Cool companies" turn a blind eye to homebrew folks who want to get a little extra functionality out of their system (by running Linux or increasing capacity or whatever), but taking away a product can only hurt the company.

Folks, you have a right to be a cheapskate. If you think that Nintendo is charging too much for VC or WiiWare or whatever, feel free to skip it. But the instant you start abusing the system, the system gets harsher for everyone. This is why we've got DRM out the wazoo and Nintendo won't let you play games from SD cards.

Sir Fidlious Wong (Zeon Defense Force) @ May 5th 2008 6:01PM

Nintendo claims they lost over $3 Billion in Gamecube piracy... clearly Nintendo wasn't letting us use that SD card to load games regardless. As evidenced by, well, the past year and a half of Wii.

aristokrat @ May 5th 2008 5:19PM

That's what Nintendo gets for making a "last-gen" system: it's easy for people to figure out how to crack it. Sony overcomes a lot of piracy by using Blu-ray disks (the price of them plus a player discourages the money saved from piracy), and Microsoft fights it through an aggressive online system (give players lot of incentives to have their consoles online, hooked into MS's centralized service, and they can scan your shit). Nintendo went with cheap tech, a cheap approach to online, and it made them a lot of money from the get-go, but now they are going to have to spend a little bit of their outrageous profits fighting a little bit of piracy. They can't honestly be that concerned with piracy, given the initial technical hurdle and the huge number of systems they have sold (making it feasible for only a small percentage of Wii owners).

I think it might be more of an issue for the WiiWare titles, only because I don't see as many casual gamers going online to buy games (if they even now it exists) versus buying more physical party games at the store. Given how surprisingly low recent numbers for Xbox Live/Playstation Online were (with their much better online incentives), I'm interested to know how many Wii's are actually connected in the first place (I'd guess a low percentage, if we are talking about actual online participation). In that case, Nintendo might be losing a good deal of profit with WiiWare piracy, since it would most likely be the more 'hardcore' gamers who would be buying these titles, yet they would also most likely have the highest overlap with the group of people who could and would pirate games.

Ultimately, Nintendo is going to lose much money over this, because they are making so much on their profit-leading hardware. With their loss-leading consoles, Microsoft and Sony have a much bigger incentive to keep their software sales up and running.

NOTE: It does seem that Nintendo's other anti-piracy strategy is to keep selling you new hardware (see Wii Fit, Wii Wheel, Wii Boogie mic, Wii cross-bow thingy, etc.), which can't just be downloaded.

aristokrat @ May 5th 2008 5:22PM

Dammit. Nintendo *isn't* going to lose much money over this.

Also, I don't mean to demean the Wii, I'm trying to be objective. In fact, I've recently been enjoying being 'Mr. Gay' (read: playing SMG) lately, which is the first time I've used my Wii in months, and I'm pleasantly surprised. Humorously, I tried out SMG because I promised myself I wouldn't play Xbox (especially Halo) until I was done with exams. Hooray for loopholes!

rv @ May 5th 2008 5:30PM

You can play online with the 360 modded, I think. Sadly, the reason many don't (also the reason I don't) mod it is because the warranty gets voided. If it wasn't for the rrod, I would have played gta 1 week early(still would've bought it though, rockstar deserves it)

aristokrat @ May 5th 2008 5:36PM

Yeah, but you can't really play online with the mods turned on, otherwise you'll get the banhammer, meaning no pirated games online. It's not bulletproof, but I also wouldn't be surprised if that $50 XBL fee is meant (at least in part) to offset offline piracy.

OM @ May 5th 2008 6:10PM

This sure is a long, ranting, and slightly anti-Nintendo post for something with an answer as easy as "So what, they'll patch it."

aristokrat @ May 5th 2008 11:47PM

They'll patch it, and then the modchip people will patch their chips, and so on ad nauseam. Unless they want to kill Wii's compatibility with older discs, the mod chips will work for the life of the system. They just have to try hard enough to discourage people, not to make it impossible, because the pirates will always win.

samfish @ May 5th 2008 5:28PM

Well, that's the end of the Twilight Princess hack, I reckon.

Co @ May 5th 2008 10:13PM

I really don't have enough time to hack my Wii, or any videogame system. I hardly have enough time to balance Mario Kart, Okami, and my job for christ's sake.

BTW, Fernando cheats at Mario Kart!!

LAWL @ May 5th 2008 5:32PM

Nice.
Hackers,gota love em.
How abot some pirate HD for teh wii plz?

Dan Bugglin @ May 5th 2008 5:48PM

The only way I can think of to block this is if Nintendo completely blocked the loading of Twilight Princess if the Twilight Hack saved game was detected in Wii memory, or to prevent that file from being transferred to the Wii. Depending on how they did this detection, it might be easily bypassed (if they do a hash) since the icon can be changed to match the original Twilight Princess one. However it would not be hard to detect the actual hack... it's documented how the hack works and it uses an invalid value in the save game file and so would be easy to detect.

However Nintendo can not actually patch the game to fix the flaw at its source. Nintendo can only update the Wii firmware, which is rewritable, while Wii discs are read-only. Nintendo would have to code up a storm to allow for game patches to be stored in the Wii memory and dynamically applied at runtime of an affected game. With the problem of limited available space on the Wii's drive, the firmware could easily check to see if a game requires an update and refuse to run it until the user clears enough space on the wii for the update to be downloaded so it could be used. This isn't likely to happen anytime soon, though.

[.sm0ke.] @ May 5th 2008 10:57PM

I'd imagine it's similar in principle to how GTA: Liberty City Stories and Lumines allowed homebrew on the PSP. I haven't really read up on the Twilight Hack since I don't have a Wii, but I'd imagine Nintendo can patch it and it'll turn into a chess match between Nintendo and the hackers.

jesterdom @ May 5th 2008 5:54PM

Well, maybe this will finally get them to realize "Oh shit. Maybe we should port these."

Blue_Falcon @ May 5th 2008 5:57PM

So when is Nintendo going to do a press release mentioning the official line-up for the U.S. WiiWare launch, anyway?

There's only a week left. Not everything needs to be done the day of release, for crying out loud.

BigD145 @ May 5th 2008 5:58PM

This would not hurt Nintendo profits given that the hack is rather convoluted and if there's one thing I don't want to do, it's to futz about with disks and software to get one game up and running.

Ken Seang @ May 5th 2008 6:02PM

Im not surprise this was gonna happen, but I don't think Nintendo will care. Due to that how many of the millions of Wii user who the majority of them are casual gamers are going to do suck a hack to a pirate game in a language they don't even comprehend?

In the Wii community the pirates are a only a small percentage of all the Wii users in the world.

CJLopez @ May 5th 2008 6:05PM

Actually, not many people will try this and go for the legal way, cuz many of this hacks could brick your wii, and even though it's a pretty cheap console, I (in my case) wouldn't dare to try this, cuz money is a big issue in the future with the next games to be released.

Jhongerkong @ May 5th 2008 6:11PM

I tried this with the Ping Pong game.

Needless to say, it became an instant buy for me when it comes here.

theturtle363 @ May 5th 2008 6:22PM

I be in ur cabin! Stealin ur dubloonz!

Markez (MKWii 4339-2878-5120) @ May 5th 2008 10:01PM

*golf clap

I'd been wondering why that caption struck me as so weak, which also means lolcatz have grown on me. I don't know if that's a good thing.

You have done well sir. I'll throw my hat in the ring, Ahem, Friendcodez is for bilgeratz.

theturtle363 @ May 5th 2008 10:36PM

yarrr

Dannyboi68 @ May 5th 2008 6:29PM

Just putting it out there: The homebrew community does not support the use of these releases. It says that at the bottom of EVERY WiiWare and Virtual Console nfo.

nxtiak @ May 5th 2008 6:40PM

Not just WiiWare, ALL VIRTUAL CONSOLE games have been hacked/pirated.
A lot of PAL VC games are available, (not so many NTSC), but there's a region free maker for PAL VC.
It's soo damn easy to use these it's hilarious.

Alex @ May 5th 2008 7:30PM

How do you download the WiiWare games? I have used the Twilight Hack so I kinda know how it works, but how do you get the program that installs them?

Matt B @ May 5th 2008 8:36PM

There is also speculation that when the big N does patch this, those that already DL'd the pirated stuff will still get to keep it since the software is tied the wii like any other VC purchase.

Cutty @ May 5th 2008 8:55PM

It's not Nintendo I feel sorry for, it's the upstart developers who are hoping to make a name for themselves through WiiWare who get my sympathy.

UltimateQ @ May 5th 2008 10:53PM

How pointless. If you have the twilight hack working, just use an emulator and wow look you can play all those same games.

Alex @ May 6th 2008 3:57PM

yeah but then you have to start up the twilight hack EVERY time you want to play them, this way you can play them straight from the menu as if you paid for them, also the Wii Ware games is another plus, the minus of doing it this way is that the Wii's harddrive is small and while you SD card's memory could be bigger.