Wow, that was quick. Our broken Wii is already back. It was delivered by UPS this morning and seems to be working fine.

The repair was done by Convar. According to the accompanying paperwork, the Wii’s mainboard was broken and it has been replaced with a new one.

Nice service, Nintendo!

Broken Wii ready to be taken away

Our Wii has just been taken away by UPS.

It all started with sporadic random freezes during games like De Blob and Zelda. Then it started happening more regularly. We could sometimes play Zelda for more than an hour, but the Wii would often freeze after 5 or 10 minutes. The freezes were often accompanied by single polygons going crazy all over the screen and always by pretty bad noise from the speakers. In the end, there were also crashes right after a reboot when doing nothing at all in the Wii’s menu.

As the Wii was unusable, we decided to get it repaired under warranty. Fortunately, it’s rather easy to get the Wii back to Nintendo:

1. Make a copy of your proof of purchase.
2. Go to Nintendo’s RMA site where you create a new repair request and describe your problem.
3. Print the shipment documents and wrap up your Wii.
4. Go to UPS’s pickup site and tell them when you want them to get the Wii from you.

I hope our Wii will be back soon.

Update: UPS fetched the Wii on the September 29th. Today (October 2nd), I got an e-mail that is has been delivered to Nintendo.

I know posts here have been slow the last couple of months. There are a lot of exciting things going on at work and I’m also doing progress on my diploma thesis which I’m going to start soon officially.

The latest Edge (204) has a Region Specific featuring Hamburg. There even is a feature of SnapDragon Games. But I’d just like to quote the introduction, enjoy:

Change is happening, and the rewiring of the game industry is turning Hamburg into one of the most important, forward-focused locations in the world.

I’m glad to be in Hamburg.