Now, while I may describe in a future post why that may actually be a good thing (tip in the meantime: don’t use your white official Nintendo memory cards in the Wii. They tend to corrupt them with WiiConnect24 on), I’ll talk about what this means to all Wii users in general.
Many of you Wii owners out there may not even have complete knowledge of what WiiConnect24 actually is, even though it may have been on ever since you got your system!
WiiConnect24 is why the Wii’s disc drive sometimes lights up with a blue trim while it’s “off” – with WiiConnect24 on, the Wii stays in a lower-power state when turned off, and the console can receive messages (or some kinds of data, I think) in this state. When this happens, the blue light surrounding the Wii begins to pulse.
So many of you may not miss this (I really don’t!), but there’s something else that you may in fact miss – a bunch of channels that could only be accessed with WiiConnect24 enabled.
This includes at least the following channels:
- Forecast Channel
- News Channel
- Check Mii Out Channel
- Everybody Votes Channel
- Nintendo Channel
And in the case that you may have noticed – yes, those first two channels came with the Wii pre-installed!
So I went on to some of these channels (I actually got through them all but the Nintendo Channel, which I ended up caring less about) and took some screenshots. Because I like preserving things that I know are going away in the near future.
I got to the News Channel, and did some experimenting.
One of the interesting things with the News Channel is that you can increase or decrease the font size at any time, and the text will be reorganized (in an animated fashion, too!) into a format that works best with that size of font. It can be done in the channel's slide show mode, as well, which basically zooms across a globe, pointing out the location of news events and giving a quick one-line statement about the story (i.e. the title).
Here’s an example of this in action:
*looks up thoughtfully to his side*
"Like, what if… we all, like, came together, and made history? You gettin’ where I’m goin’ man?”
And it’s at this moment when I realize, “Crud dang it – I’m just sitting here staring at my Wii taking screenshots of channels soon to die when there are people out there doing inspiring things like this! I need to get OUT THERE!”
Then I grew up and became the Prime Minister of Jamaica.
The end.
