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December 17th, 2006, 22:25 Posted By: wraggster
via nintendoreport
The Mii Channel is everyone's guilty pleasure. It's easy to waste countless hours creating your own little walking masterpieces. Once you've created the perfect Mii, the first thing you usually do is to send it to all of the people on your friends list. If you're like us, you have a lot of friends. In the process of sending Miis to them, you might come across this nasty little message:
What if you have more than twenty people to send your Mii to? What if you've made three or four Miis and don't want to wait to distribute the goods to everyone? Luckily, there's a work-around for this annoyance. The Wii keeps track of how many Miis you've sent in a given day via the console's internal calendar...which can be changed.
To circumvent the Wii's Mii-sending cap, simply change the Wii's date to something wildly different than the current date. Don't worry, this won't screw up anything internally (unless you boot a Wii game that is time-sensitive). Once the change is in place, you can either send another 20 Miis before the limiter stops you again, or simply send one and change the date back. You can send another twenty Miis once the calendar is reset back to normal.
The Mii limit seems silly, considering that you can have up to 100 contacts in your Wii Address Book. If the whole point of the Mii Channel is to share your creations with your friends, why impose the limit in the first place? At least it's easy to get around.
Don't like that default blue bowling ball you always get stuck with when playing a solo game of Wii Bowling? Never fear, because there's something you can do to change it.
After selecting the Mii you want to use in the pre-game menus, a warning message will display. (It's usually the one that warns you about hitting anything while you play.) At this time, you can hold down one of the four D-Pad directions on the Wii remote and press the A Button to change your ball color to something different.
D-Pad Left: Red ball
D-Pad Right: Gold ball
D-Pad Up: Blue ball
D-Pad Down: Green ball
When playing a multiplayer game with multiple controllers, each player can select their own ball color. If you like the blue ball but aren't Player 1, holding Up on the pad will get you your favorite color.
There's another type of bowling ball you can get, but it can't be obtained via a secret code. If you want it, you're going to need to earn it...
As your skill level in Wii Sports Baseball increases, the pitch variety of the computer opponents will mix up considerably. One of the things the computer does to throw off your home run timing is to throw sidearm pitches instead of the traditional overhand hurls. The instruction manual doesn't tell you how to do this, so it seems like one less advantage you have against the other team.
Well, here's the secret of the sidearm pitch. In addition to changing pitch types with combinations of the A Button and B Trigger, the 1 and 2 Buttons allow you to change your throw style on the fly. In the default overhand throw mode, hitting the 2 Button before flinging the ball toward the plate will cause you to dip down and deliver a pitch from a lower angle. You'll continue to throw balls this way until hitting the 1 Button to switch back to the regular throwing style.
The different angle of the sidearm throw makes pitches behave differently than the equivalent overhand jobs. Picking up on pitches is vital on knowing when to hold back or knowing when to swing for the fences, so delivering them differently each time is crucial to defensive success. If you're having trouble beating your friends from the mound, try throwing them some heat from down below!
The Wii Menu is the first thing you see when you boot up the system. The default layout of the channels is alright if you don't plan on purchasing too many Virtual Console games, but if your itch for classic games is too strong to resist scratching, you may find that you may not be satisfied with how the channels are organized on the menu.
There's an oft-overlooked remedy to this problem. Holding down the A Button and B Trigger while pointing at a channel screen will grab it for easy repositioning into an empty slot. This allows you to arrange your Virtual Console library in the way that you want, or shift under-used channels to a different page. Moving channels around also gives you the added benefit of switching between them with the Plus/Minus buttons in the order of your choosing. There are no restrictions on where you can place channels, other than the Disc Channel cannot be moved from the upper-left corner on the first page.
The A+B dragging trick isn't just limited to the Wii Menu. Obviously, it's how you pick up Miis in the Mii Plaza and Mii Parade areas of the Mii Channel. However, you can also use it to spread out your messages on the Wii Message Board so that you don't accidentally open a message you didn't want because it was laying on top of another one.
Tennis is always a good game to come back to when you've got friends to play it with. Too bad there's only one court with which you can disperse the love. But wait, we've got an ace up our sleeve! Do you know about the blue court you practice on in the Tennis Training Mode games? There's a secret option to select it before starting a standard doubles match.
After picking Miis in the pre-game menus and arriving at the final warning screen, hold down the 2 Button before advancing. Keep it held down until the black fades to reveal the blue practice court on which you can play a regular doubles game. There's nothing particularly special about the location, but at least it's different than what you're used to seeing.
For kicks, you can turn a single-player match into a one-person Pong-off by setting all four player slots on the court to your own Mii. What better way is there to practice Tennis than to play against yourself?
There are secrets hidden within the Wii. Do you know about them? We do!
The Wii Photo Channel is fairly useless. You can do all sorts of goofy stuff with pictures on an SD card, but you can't save any changes you make to them unless you post them to the Wii Message Board and send them to yourself in an email message. The ability to create slide shows set to an MP3 file is okay, but what fun is that?
One way to kill time in the Photo Channel is to break a photo into pieces and then try to put the picture back together. To reach the Photo Channel's puzzle mode, you first need to select the "Fun!" option when viewing a photo, then select Puzzle from the list of options. If you haven't done a puzzle with the selected photo, you'll first need to do an easy six-piece test to unlock the ability to select how many puzzle pieces you want to break the picture into.
Depending on the picture you use and the number of pieces you choose to jumble it up with, it can be a genuine challenge to get the picture straight. The puzzle difficulty selection screen will show that you can only do a 48-piece puzzle at most, but there's a secret to up the difficulty to an insane level. If you hold down the 1 Button, the 48 box will change to 192. If you select it while still holding the button down, your photo will turn into a mosaic of epic proportions.
Photo puzzle mode doesn't work like a traditional slide puzzle, as you can drag any piece to any location you want. The two chips will swap places with each other. Even with this change, fixing a puzzle with that many tiny pieces is borderline ridiculous. If you don't feel like acting like the All the King's Horses and All the King's Men, you might want to stick to putting back together something that is less scrambled. Still, the option is there if you're hardcore enough.
Oh, there's another secret hidden within the Wii Photo Channel menus. We're not going to tell you what it is, but a certain kitty-cat will spill the beans if you're fast enough to squeeze them out of him...
Training Mode in Wii Sports offers a lot of games that put a unique spin on the different sports available. The most fun of the lot is probably the Bowling Power Throws training game. In each of the ten rounds, another row of pins is added to the tail-end of the rack until finally reaching a mind-boggling 91-pins. Though knocking them all down is worth double points, finding the sweet spot in a forest that large is nigh impossible.
It always helps to hurl the ball down the lane as hard as possible—just make sure you hold on to the remote (or else). For the last test, however, there's an easter egg that proves that sometimes brains wins over brawn. If you're good enough to do this, you deserve to get the 182-pin score that the feat will net you.
As you can see in the video, you need to make sure the ball travels all the way down the length of the top of the right-side barrier. (It works on the left side too, so all you lefties can breathe a little easier.) It cannot fall off to the side, even after the the ball gets behind the pins. This requires the right angle, ball speed and spin to perform correctly, but once mastered it can make getting a gold medal much easier. The trick only works on stage 10, so you're still going to need to figure out how to knock down all of stage 9's 78 pins on your own.
Conclusion
These are just some of the tricks and secrets Nintendo stashed away inside the Wii. There's no doubt many more are waiting to be found. The inherently fun nature of the Wii interface allowed Nintendo to slip this bonus stuff into it. Perhaps future system updates and new Wii Channels will have more extras hidden within.
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