It’s hard to explain how we feel. Seems like time flies so quickly and you go from being a teen to a young adult in that time span. Though in that time span, our little friend connected us to great friends and peers. So for it 15 birthday we decided to make a birthday post.
2005
Our story actually starts a year or 2 prior to the weeklong span of time we were finally able to buy our Wii. During the prehistoric times of three-day E3 conferences broadcast on G4TV we got our first glimpse of what was known at the time as the Nintendo Revolution and boy was that an understatement in the years to come. During this time we only had our DS Lite and a Gamecube with XD Gale of Darkness, Mario Kart:Double Dash and Mario Party 7 amongst a few other titles and we remember having a burning desire for Nintendo’s next console. When commercials started airing, we’d geekout on them like we did with games we bought during the DS era. Soon afterwards, we’d bug our dad in preparation but to no avail. In retrospect, this was for the best, memory-wise.
2005-06
It was around this time we moved back in with our grandmother and turned the room we and our father shared simply into our room. However shortly before this we remember geeking out over the Wii promo commercials including unique promos on Comedy Central? with a show called ??? during the Thanksgiving block known as Thanksgive-a-way Wiikend? After research, it seems only 3 of these commercials were made.
Thanksgiveaway Wiikend - Segment Trilogy
We really have to thank our father who taught us about how to make money by cutting yards which he helped us buy Pokemon Emerald as a reward for a lesson well learned. Can’t thank you enough. It would be these skills that would allow us to slave away a whole summer; maybe 2 but definitely the entirety of summer 2007.
2007
When yard cuttin season came around we grabbed our water, gas tank and mower and trekked through our neighborhood cutting yards for money at a slow and steady pace every weekend. We were making great pace to be able to buy one in the summer but two critical factors would force it back to August. The first was we hit something and accidentally broke our mower and to be taught another lesson, we came outta pocket $200 for repairs. Devastating being so close but stayed persistent. Sadly, even when we were close, our uncle couldn’t spare 20 or so dollars to help us get one so he took us back home. Couldn’t be mad it’s his money afterall. The other factor was when we finally saved up enough we had to call and search every game store and walmart in town for availability and the Wii stayed sold out. Eventually we lucked out and during the second week of August 2007 a walmart had exactly one left if we’re recalling it correctly so we asked our grandmother to take us to get it and the rest was history.
All of our work had paid off and we set it up immediately; giving it the name Yoswii, and played Wii Sports. Like DoShi, Yoswii’s name was inspired by our favorite Nintendo character Yoshi. We also gave a 2 or the 3 drawers of our little gaming dresser-thing. The one above DoShi was name “???” and was dedicated to the games and their cases while the one below named “???” was for Yoswii accessories. Apparently we were so excited we had a typo which we lazily fixed.
<insert dresser pic here>
2008
But just because we got our Wii, we didn’t stop cutting yard as there were games and accessories we need to buy and this culminated in the “Wii want a Challenge” video of 2008. All of the gear seen in that video was the result of all our yard cutting including the satisfying switch from dail-up speed internet via the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connector to DSL.
Our top games were Pokemon Battle Revolution(fostered a strong love use to enjoying DPPt with thr like of those in the Serebii.net chat and some of our EX friends like Alene and Myron), Super Mario Galaxy(date check), Super Smash Bros and Super Paper Mario which we remember we had our grandmother take us to Gamestop on a cold drizzly winter? day to pick up. Brawl. Mario Kart Wii is also it this category but is also responsible for helping us make some lifelong e-friends that October when we join the racing clan Elite X in its infancy.
talk about Alene vs. PBR
Outside of gaming we had become obsessed with Japanese culture and anime and the Internet Channel allowed us to watch anime on our TV while in bed. Back then animes were often cut up into 3 part per episode to fit on Youtube but occasionally you’d see the rare 2 or 4 parters. We also remember hearing about rumors of JSFR gamr and Sailor Moon game coming to Wii but of course the first one was pitched and not accepted and the other was nothing more than a rumor. Surprisingly, both of the sources below still exist as of August 2022:
A Rumor from 2007 stating that Namco planned to bring Sailor Moon to Wii
<Insert Internet Channel screenshot here>
(Maybe document Wii Photo channel x Elementz updates ie. can play movie? if so it was test on Maburaho epi1. Also, custom music from .aac to mp3)
Also forgot to mention that when free days would present themselves at our high school we bring our Wii and play with our class as well as fueling our gaming rivalry with MLK and helping our Spanish & Journalist teacher and best friend as well as favorite teacher who understood and endured our sulky/ing times Ms. Baker. During the summer though we’d often visit our mom and siblings in East Texas as we had more freedom there…well except for one thing, no internet. So we have to enjoy our games offline along with our VHS archives of our favorite TV recordings.Even worse, in 2009 we forgot our power cable back home rendering Yoswii unplayable. We were fortunate our sister’s boyfriend at the time drove us aboit 30 minutes into town to buy one at the local GameStop. Other memories include our sister letting one of the kids living with her mishandling Yoswii while we were out playing but fortunately Yoswii took no damage. Another was teaching our brother how to play Sonic in Brawl and us getting stuck on the rail on Toad’s Factory at our stepfather’s house. We recorded the incident and uploaded it as soon as we got home. That video is in the playlist below.
When not at school we work on our “Heroes of Nytundo” series until our Sony Vaio died after the production of Episode 3 Part 1 and other videos in the day and race with our MKW clan in the late evening after homework and Japanese self-study was completed. Eventually a few of our clan member had started hacking their Wii’s to gain more feature and become For-the-Lose MKW hacker that gave out items and VR each match. The three we remember vividly are PhenoMario, Alene/Nala and iHaxel. After getting interested in it we loaded up our SD card and triggered SmashStack(check) in SSBB and the long process of hacking had begun. Being smart and following the guide, we put all the security protocols into place before engaging in mods and hacks. This would be important as while trying to apply a custom themes we brick Yoswii twice but was able to restore it from the brink. We settled on a stable Dark Theme and it has remain unchanged since.
Elez's & co. FTL Hackin Compilation
<insert hackin vids here?>
<Shawn in EX and talkin on Wii Speak in 2010?>
2009
Our cousin who lived down the street would also come over to indulge in Elite X shenanigans as well as No More Heroes, Death Jr. Root of Evil and our most competitive game, Sonic & Sega All Stars Racing. It would be our Beat or Billy Hatcher against his Sonic & Big. The stage was always Shibuya Downtown, 9 laps, no items. We were so good that we’d say it was always a 50/50 on who was gonna win. An honest test of endurance as we’d both have to concentrate for almost 15 minutes. Also during that summer prior to goin to East Texas we met a new friend while out cutting yards who was into game an anime as well. They were the same one who did the new art for our characters from Elementz v3 and someone we swap Gamecube and Wii games with. We also resonatee on Arc Rise Fantasia as they were inyo JRPG like it and the Tales of… Series. (CONT HERE)
2010
Normal gaming and modding would continue until graduating. The unique summer break between high school and college gave us ample time to enjoy our most anticipated RPG, Arc Rise Fantasia. We had been watching a Japanese walkthrough since its release in 2009 by a youtuber name EmiruTheKnight if we’re remembering correctly.
Now with the game in hand we burnt the game to our 2TB Hard Drive along with days of anime to watch via WiiMC and spent the summer in east Texas again with our mom. During that time we’d play Sega All-Stars Racing with our cousin there and they didn’t stand much of a chance so we tone down our skill and just had fun. When the younger one watched us play ARF he also imitated L’Arc Ignis Beat each time by syncing up when he said “you’re not running from this flame, no way!”. We’d go on to 100% that game that summer.
<insert sole picture from Sherry/Sharon’s house>
That fall we’d start attending community college and we’d bring our DS and Wii to the lounge area known as the Lion’s Den where we could use an old school big screen TV to play SSBB, Mario Party and Double Dash amongst other games. This resulted in us connected with a great circle of friends we still have today. Unfortunately, our naivete led to letting down our guard and someone stealing our copy of Diamond, Pearl and Platinum, games that were critical to our mental soundness during our high school year. That will always bear on us. However back to Yoswii, the next interesting phase was showing off hacks in brawl. This included things like overpowered and invincible characters as well as custom skins, stages, music and movesets amongst other things we’d end up gaming until the college closed and then we’d head outside to talk. Also got them to play a Shin Chan party game to hilarious results.
Mention super generalization code
Falcon Dair spam
Pika global thunder insta-kill
“Speedo” Snake who could slow down time when smoking a cig with his ?down taunt?
2010-2011
These would be enjoyed until our friend TCGamer accidently dropped our Wii and broke the SD. This would also have the never effect of possibly compromising recovery efforts though we have “fixed” it as of 2022. It was also around this time; winter 2010-2011, that we decided it was time to fix our noisy disc drive that was also possibly scratching our game. Despite the anxiety about the process, this would be the time we decided to open up and fix Yoswii ourselves. Also due to its hacked nature, sending it in to Nintendo was a no-go.
<insert disassembled Wii picture including mummy alive+WiiU>
Needless to say the process was a success though we didn’t put Yoswii back together completely right but close enough. We’d go on to open or modified Yoswii multiple times including the swapping of it base white casing to a clear case with RGB light. We believe we read somewhere that it was called the chameleon casing. We got sloppy with each opening and ironic put it back together in a way that compressed the disc slot prevent the spinning of any disc, but by this point all of the GC and Wii games we cared about were playable via USB/HDD so the disc drive has gone unused for almost a decade. As far as we know it works but not in Yoswii current config.
2012-21
At this point in time we primarily used Yoswii to enjoy our favorite old-school and childhood shows via WiiMC. But then that time came, the announcement of the Wii U. This also showed the age of the Wii itself but due to Yoswii’s customization, it would always remain useful/with purpose. 2013 was probably the last year we use Yoswii in any meaningful way as we had shifted to the recently released WiiU and 3DS but Yoswii’s hack & nostalgia would always have us coming back.
During the WiiU Era we loaned out Yoswii to Zer0 and TCGamer who took care and enjoyed it as expected. Well beside the wiping of our Wii games on our WBFS Partition of our 2TB HDDcby TCGamer younger brother. Fortunately this was well after the time we started to rely on double redundancy so while most of the lesser games were lost the ones most special and personal to use were easily recovered. While the others are recoverable we decided it not worth the effort restoring them.
2021
For the next handful of years Yoswii would often go unused for the majority of each of those years. It would only be in 2021 where we’d stop being lazy and tweak Yoswii a bit based on new development in the homebrew scene. First we restored its internet capabilities with Riiconnect24 and redownload first party Wii Channels like the Internet Channel, Check Mii Out & Everybody Votes Channel. We recorded a video of the deletion of a legacy Wi-Fi Connection to add our current internet connection data to Yoswii.. We also reconfigured the homebrew apps we use for playing GC games. The last thing we need to do is edit some IOS stubs to prevent some games from looking up at certain points, looking at you Arc Rise Fantasia.
That leads us to today, August of 2022 celebrating Yoswii 15th birthday.(cont. here)
As for the future of Yoswii, it still work fine and we still use it a few times a month but mostly for WiiMC & playing GC, Wii and other retro games. We still have multiple copies of its NAND stored across multiple mediums alongside our Switch’s NAND but that won’t protect Yoswii from any inevitable hardware failure and when that happen that will be the end of its saga but until then we’ll continue to enjoy the memories we created together and with others around us.
<Insert recording of Yoswii in 2022 via Portable recorder>
<Insert Internet Channel screenshot here>
(Maybe document Wii Photo channel x Elementz updates ie. can play movie? if so it was test on Maburaho epi1. Also, custom music from .aac to mp3)
Also forgot to mention that when free days would present themselves at our high school we bring our Wii and play with our class as well as fueling our gaming rivalry with MLK and helping our Spanish & Journalist teacher and best friend as well as favorite teacher who understood and endured our sulky/ing times Ms. Baker. During the summer though we’d often visit our mom and siblings in East Texas as we had more freedom there…well except for one thing, no internet. So we have to enjoy our games offline along with our VHS archives of our favorite TV recordings.Even worse, in 2009 we forgot our power cable back home rendering Yoswii unplayable. We were fortunate our sister’s boyfriend at the time drove us aboit 30 minutes into town to buy one at the local GameStop. Other memories include our sister letting one of the kids living with her mishandling Yoswii while we were out playing but fortunately Yoswii took no damage. Another was teaching our brother how to play Sonic in Brawl and us getting stuck on the rail on Toad’s Factory at our stepfather’s house. We recorded the incident and uploaded it as soon as we got home. That video is in the above playlist.
When not at school we work on our “Heroes of Nytundo” series until our Sony Vaio died after the production of Episode 3 Part 1 and other videos in the day and race with our MKW clan in the late evening after homework and Japanese self-study was completed. Eventually a few of our clan member had started hacking their Wii’s to gain more feature and become For-the-Lose MKW hacker that gave out items and VR each match. The three we remember vividly are PhenoMario, Alene/Nala and iHaxel. After getting interested in it we loaded up our SD card and triggered SmashStack(check) in SSBB and the long process of hacking had begun. Being smart and following the guide, we put all the security protocols into place before engaging in mods and hacks. This would be important as while trying to apply a custom themes we brick Yoswii twice but was able to restore it from the brink. We settled on a stable Dark Theme and it has remain unchanged since.
<insert hackin vids here?>
<Shawn in EX and talkin on Wii Speak in 2010?>
2009
Our cousin who lived down the street would also come over to indulge in Elite X shenanigans as well as No More Heroes, Death Jr. Root of Evil and our most competitive game, Sonic & Sega All Stars Racing. It would be our Beat or Billy Hatcher against his Sonic & Big. The stage was always Shibuya Downtown, 9 laps, no items. We were so good that we’d say it was always a 50/50 on who was gonna win. An honest test of endurance as we’d both have to concentrate for almost 15 minutes. Also during that summer prior to goin to East Texas we met a new friend while out cutting yards who was into game an anime as well. They were the same one who did the new art for our characters from Elementz v3 and someone we swap Gamecube and Wii games with. We also resonatee on Arc Rise Fantasia as they were inyo JRPG like it and the Tales of… Series. (CONT HERE)
2010
Normal gaming and modding would continue until graduating. The unique summer break between high school and college gave us ample time to enjoy our most anticipated RPG, Arc Rise Fantasia. We had been watching a Japanese walkthrough since its release in 2009 by a youtuber name EmiruTheKnight if we’re remembering correctly.
Now with the game in hand we burnt the game to our 2TB Hard Drive along with days of anime to watch via WiiMC and spent the summer in east Texas again with our mom. During that time we’d play Sega All-Stars Racing with our cousin there and they didn’t stand much of a chance so we tone down our skill and just had fun. When the younger one watched us play ARF he also imitated L’Arc Ignis Beat each time by syncing up when he said “you’re not running from this flame, no way!”. We’d go on to 100% that game that summer.
<insert sole picture from Sherry/Sharon’s house>
That fall we’d start attending community college and we’d bring our DS and Wii to the lounge area known as the Lion’s Den where we could use an old school big screen TV to play SSBB, Mario Party and Double Dash amongst other games. This resulted in us connected with a great circle of friends we still have today. Unfortunately, our naivete led to letting down our guard and someone stealing our copy of Diamond, Pearl and Platinum, games that were critical to our mental soundness during our high school year. That will always bear on us. However back to Yoswii, the next interesting phase was showing off hacks in brawl. This included things like overpowered and invincible characters as well as custom skins, stages, music and movesets amongst other things we’d end up gaming until the college closed and then we’d head outside to talk. Also got them to play a Shin Chan party game to hilarious results.
Mention super generalization code
Falcon Dair spam
Pika global thunder insta-kill
“Speedo” Snake who could slow down time when smoking a cig with his ?down taunt?
2010-2011
These would be enjoyed until our friend TCGamer accidently dropped our Wii and broke the SD. This would also have the never effect of possibly compromising recovery efforts though we have “fixed” it as of 2022. It was also around this time; winter 2010-2011, that we decided it was time to fix our noisy disc drive that was also possibly scratching our game. Despite the anxiety about the process, this would be the time we decided to open up and fix Yoswii ourselves. Also due to its hacked nature, sending it in to Nintendo was a no-go.
<insert disassembled Wii picture including mummy alive+WiiU>
Needless to say the process was a success though we didn’t put Yoswii back together completely right but close enough. We’d go on to open or modified Yoswii multiple times including the swapping of it base white casing to a clear case with RGB light. We believe we read somewhere that it was called the chameleon casing. We got sloppy with each opening and ironic put it back together in a way that compressed the disc slot prevent the spinning of any disc, but by this point all of the GC and Wii games we cared about were playable via USB/HDD so the disc drive has gone unused for almost a decade. As far as we know it works but not in Yoswii current config.
2012-21
At this point in time we primarily used Yoswii to enjoy our favorite old-school and childhood shows via WiiMC. But then that time came, the announcement of the Wii U. This also showed the age of the Wii itself but due to Yoswii’s customization, it would always remain useful/with purpose. 2013 was probably the last year we use Yoswii in any meaningful way as we had shifted to the recently released WiiU and 3DS but Yoswii’s hack & nostalgia would always have us coming back.
During the WiiU Era we loaned out Yoswii to Zer0 and TCGamer who took care and enjoyed it as expected. Well beside the wiping of our Wii games on our WBFS Partition of our 2TB HDDcby TCGamer younger brother. Fortunately this was well after the time we started to rely on double redundancy so while most of the lesser games were lost the ones most special and personal to use were easily recovered. While the others are recoverable we decided it not worth the effort restoring them.
2021
For the next handful of years Yoswii would often go unused for the majority of each of those years. It would only be in 2021 where we’d stop being lazy and tweak Yoswii a bit based on new development in the homebrew scene. First we restored its internet capabilities with Riiconnect24 and redownload first party Wii Channels like the Internet Channel, Check Mii Out & Everybody Votes Channel. We recorded a video of the deletion of a legacy Wi-Fi Connection to add our current internet connection data to Yoswii.. We also reconfigured the homebrew apps we use for playing GC games. The last thing we need to do is edit some IOS stubs to prevent some games from looking up at certain points, looking at you Arc Rise Fantasia.
That leads us to today, August of 2022 celebrating Yoswii 15th birthday.(cont. here)
As for the future of Yoswii, it still work fine and we still use it a few times a month but mostly for WiiMC & playing GC, Wii and other retro games. We still have multiple copies of its NAND stored across multiple mediums alongside our Switch’s NAND but that won’t protect Yoswii from any inevitable hardware failure and when that happen that will be the end of its saga but until then we’ll continue to enjoy the memories we created together and with others around us.
<Insert recording of Yoswii in 2022 via Portable recorder>