A busted Wii uncovers more layers of bizarre Nintendo practices.

After years of me slamming the fail rate of the 360, my launch day Wii finally gave up the ghost last week. The popular stats say only 6 to 10% of Wiis fail, and a small fraction of those come back from Mushroom Kingdom Repair entirely blanked of data. I played those odds and I lost.

I knew my Wii was sickly. It had been making loud and louder disk-reading noises for quite some time. It sounded like an imminent hardware failure, but since it was still running I did not send it off for a checkup. It was out of warranty anyway, so why not just wait until the abacus dies and then get it fixed. That's what I know about how computer parts work.

The Wii went quiet for good one night, refusing to boot up beyond the Health and Safety Warning. It went off to the Syracuse tech support the next day.

Now, I'm not entirely stupid. I was backing up what I could. I shunted just about everything off to an SD. Just about, because a handful of key first party games do not allow you to copy the saves off to SD. Let's tick them off: Animal Crossing City Folk, Smash Brawl, Mario Kart, Pokemon Ranch. Probably a couple others.

So while I was backing up such important saves as Link's Crossbow Training, Wii Play and Cooking Mama: Cook Off, I was gambling that my BIG saves would weather the repair storm. Turns out, they didn't.

Here's the checkbox you don't want to see on your Nintendo repair summary:

That is one heartbreaking check. All saves, gone. All Miis, gone. Friend list, Photo Channel pics, emails, internet settings. And yeah, that means a new Friend Code, so anybody who was in the address book is also about to be inconvenienced as they delete the old listing. My new code is 0407 6167 0333 6120.

Tonight, my mission was to bring my system back up to what it once was. Or, as near as I could since I wasn't about to slog through seven hours of Subspace Emissary again. First up, running system updates since the repair shop did not hand off a fully-updated Wii OS.

Then I had my sister send me our family Miis. It felt so good to see little Mii Clark hop back onto the screen. I was surprised to see that, even though she sent them to me, the Mii Channel still recognized them as my property. Weird.

I've already pleaded with Tony to send me the handful of other Miis that I know we swapped back and forth. I'll have to go hassle the other thirty people formerly on my Wii Friend List, since they'll all need my new code and I'll need their old ones again. As for other handmade Miis, I had previously uploaded a bunch to the Check Mii Out Channel, so I can restore a couple from there. Of course, nothing can be done about the loss of my 1000+ Mii Parade.

I had to re-download all of my Virtual Console/WiiWare purchases. Interestingly, I did not have to re-enter my Nintendo.com name and password. How did Nintendo's elves manage that one, eh? I suppose they attached my new console serial number to my old Shop Channel account?

Since I sort of have a new Wii, the downloaded games that I "backed up" to an SD card are useless, as they are not authorized to play on this system. So I definitely had to perform a Shop Channel download, not a straight copy back from that SD. For each game. This took about an hour. The in-game purchases for Darklord had to be done within Darklord. However it happened, I was able to grab everything again with no issues. And it still had my insane Shop Channel credit of 9700 points.

Now, about my game save files. It would not let me copy a save file over to a Wii unless the Wii had already played that game. For serious. An error message told me this. So instead of simply copying every backed-up file from the SD to the Wii (I say "simply," but there's no batch copy option), I had to put every disk into the Wii first and only then could I copy the file over. What the hell, man? I know I've copied save files over to other people's Wiis in the past?!?

At first, I was booting up each game so the Wii could "see" them. Hi, Ben 10: Protector of Earth! Hello again Endless Ocean! Then I figured out that you just need to insert the disk and let it spin up so it appears in the menu button. The Wii must have some stupid internal registry of every game it sees, and it adds to that list whenever you insert a new disk. (For download titles, I could not copy over the save until I had re-downloaded the games.)

Once I had re-established the Miis and copied the saved saves, most of the games came back no problem. Wii Sports Resort went right back to showing how Clark and I played Swordfighting last month.

This still left the big games out in the cold. So I took a step I never imagined: I hit the internet for hacked save files. It's a terrible, awful solution, I know. But I had already unlocked all the fighters and boards for Smash Brawl, and almost all the characters for Kart. I'll be damned if I'm going to go through all that again. So while the stats for those games are no longer mine (AAAUUAUGGGHHHHHH), at least I'm back to the full complement of choices for the next time we play. And actually, in Kart's case, I've got a few I didn't have before.

Since my Smash photos and replays were already being saved to SD, I did not lose those happy memories.

But of course, there's new game-specific Friend Codes. My new Smash code is 3953 6482 9682 and in Kart I'm now 4082 4973 9771. Blah. What a stupid system.

The online saves I found for Excitebots didn't work, so that game joins EA Active, Endless Ocean and Animal Crossing in the pile of Games I've Seemingly Never Played. Elebits, too. Not sure why that save file didn't survive the fire. Notice that they all begin with vowels. Coincidence?

I'm not sure what to do about Animal Crossing. Luckily, my verve for the game is not once it was once, and I'm especially glad that Clark is not old enough to truly obsess about what we lost here. Nevertheless, we had 100 hours on that game, and it is now completely gone. Our characters, our neighbors, our museum collection, our accumulated treasures... wiped. I do feel a little sick every time something else occurs to me. The gyroids I was giving to Brewster! The special Nintendo DLC items! The b&w pixel artwork! I had just received the Golden Slingshot. Oy.

Starting over means another painful hour of running errands for Nook, followed by the stark emptiness that the game dumps you in for the first month. I just don't know if I'm strong enough to build that back up.

I suppose the lesson here is to send a machine out for repair BEFORE it goes entirely belly-up.