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.

Of course, SnapDragon Games had a booth at the gamescom 2009. Here are some impressions of the up-coming The Kore Gang.

Wii insider TV: gamescom 2009 Tag 3, starts at 4:24:

And a report by Wii Insider

Gamescom 09 Gameplay: The Kore Gang (1/3) (10do):

Gamescom 09 Gameplay: The Kore Gang (2/3) (10do):

Gamescom 09 Gameplay: The Kore Gang (3/3) (10do):

Update: There is a preview at eurogamer.de.

Last week, MTV visited our office. They did some filming for a report on The Kore Gang. The result aired yesterday and has already appeared online, too:

So I was lucky and Santa brought me a Wii.

Wii: Rating:

Naturally, it’s not the first time I played with it, but it really is a lot of fun – especially for multi-player sessions. A few days later I bought myself Super Mario Galaxy because you cannot not have the Mario game for your Nintendo console.

Super Mario Galaxy: Rating:

I had to subtract half a star for making me sick the first two times I played it and making me mad everytime I fall off some platform.

Yesterday, I’ve signed my first employment contract. OK, it wasn’t for a real job, but for an intership at a game development studio.

The internship is at SnapDragon Games which is a studio that mainly works on games for Nintendo’s current consoles: DS and Wii. I’ll start on September 1st and will be there for six months.

I’m very excited and looking forward to it. I think that it’s going to be a lot of fun and that I’ll learn a lot. For preparation I’m going to look into homebrew DS development in the next three months.

Maybe my dream of working in the industry will eventually become true?