Wii've been hacked

Ok, I'm not a spring chicken, and I'm not as into gamming as I used to be. (back in the days of creating game Levels for UT2004, QUAKEII, Doom, and other such hot titles of yester-year) But I have to say I love my Wii. My biggest complaint about the unit, in fact all game consoles, is that I have to endlessly keep changing out the game disks. Lame. More over, being the father of a 6 year old boy and a 3 year old girl, I have to say I'm tired of replacing trashed $40.00-$60.00 game disks that get ruined because, well, kids are kids and have a hard time understanding the care of game disks, though my son is getting better and learning through Wii-Timeouts.

I discovered that you can hack your Wii to use a USB Hard Drive, and through various 3rd party utilities, can also rip your games all down to the hard drive and have your Wii play them directly from hard drive. This sounded risky to me, but with 2 kids I figured one thing. If I do this and it works I will save the cost of a brand new Wii by eliminating the need for game disks to be out, and needed consistently. If it worked I would only need to use the game disk one time for the initial load, then I could store them neatly. My kids won't trash disks and I won't have to buy the fourth copy of Mario Kart Wii (I know, most parent say simply don't replace the disks...but I like to play too, and am technically inclined)

I did it. It worked, holy cow this is the greatest thing in the known Wii universe. I loaded a program called USB Loader GX, and then used it to load my games on to the Hard Drive. It downloads the case art and the game disk art in just a few clicks, and here's the cool part. You get a awesome 3D Rolodex like view of all your game cases as the menu system. You just flip through them, pick the one you want, click on it and start gaming. As an added bonus the in-between level-loads and auto-saves go WAY faster as the HD and USB 2.0 interface are much faster than the DVD Drive.

I have to say, if you think you can handle it go for it and hack your Wii today. I suggest visiting www.wiihacks.com to learn more.

p.s. I haven't had to change out game disks for my three year old daughter in a few days now. Talk about a nice reprieve.

p.p.s. Oh, if you damage you Wii, and you can, hacking it I really don't want to hear any complaints about it. Life is about knowing your limits. Mine allow me to hack my Wii.