Wii lens cleaner

I don’t think I’d have the stamina to blow for 10 straight minutes.

’didja play smash bros too much?’

’didja throw it in disgust during the sixth hour of the Subspace Emissary single player nonsense?’

’are you rippin’ three foot tubes?’

The answer is yes and no my friends. But the clear and solid answer is that Nintendo has made my Wii dysfunctional in order to protect itself from piracy!

How?

PROLOGUE

Nintendo claims that dust and smoke may affect the laser lens in the Wii, especially when reading a dual-layer disc like Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Nintendo has offered to clean the lenses for free, even offering free fedex shipping.

1. I purcahsed my Wii on day one of it’s US release. I have never had a disc read error or really any error for that matter with my Wii. This involves pulling three foot tubes, shotgunning the Wii for good measure, and the usual tomfoolery that accompanies a beersoaked 23 year old cursing at a level 1900 Tatsumya returning every *****power serve.

2. Like every other person who gives two ****s about Nintendo, Wii, or less specifically games, I purchased Super Smash Bros. Brawl (SSBB) on the morning of its release.

3. Upon popping the disc in, the Wii demanded a system update before I played the game. Like every other person who gives two ****about Wii, my Wii is wirelessly connected to the internet. I do not believe this system update was presented as ’optional,’ therefore I updated.

4. Some eighty plus hours of gameplay later, almost exclusively with SSBB, the Wii stops reading ALL discs. Now, don’t get me wrong, there was a significant amount of tube-pulling going on during the relatively-nonstop free-for-all four-player action, but I became curious as to how one game or one dirty lens would affect ALL discs.

5. Like any other ******addict, I tried everything in my power to get the ****er to work. Nothing worked.

6. I called Nintendo, and without question and with great haste, they facillitated a guaranteed one work-week return, providing i send both my Wii and my copy of SSBB.

7. A trip to Fedex later, the Wii is shipped for free to Redmond, Washington, is received and is scheduled to be returned within 5 business days. Hasty, right?

So where’s the conspiracy?

Step by step:

If Nintendo is simply cleaning the dirty lenses, what prevents them from becoming dirty again? To my knowledge, cleaning does not imply a re-routing of the ventilation system. Therefore, I ponder: will my Wii need a lens-cleaning every 3000 hours? Will they make a home-version of their very high-tech cleaning instruments? After all, no home-based consumer cleaning instrument is recommended or even viable for the ’cleaning’ of the lens.

Next, there are a significant amount of modded Wiis floating around. In Denver alone, there are quite a few on Craigslist. For those that ain’t in the know, ’modded Wiis’ means that their components have been altered to allow the playing of imported discs (bypassing regional coding) in addition to DVDs and ’back-ups’ (pirated copies) of games.

I theorize that if someone is so passionate to modify their Wii, they would also be savvy enough to connect it to the internet, and in turn, be passionate enough to purchase (and subsequently pirate) a copy (legitimate or illegitamate) of SSBB. This isn’t so hard to imagine, as the entire world knows that SSBB is the fastest selling game in Nintendo’s epic history. I also speculate that the majority of modded Wiis would have been purchased some time closer to the Wii’s intial launch, as the modders tend to be the ’wait-in-line’ sort of folk, bringing a buddy, buying two, selling one on ebay, etc.

So, people get the game and the system update, play the game, and suddenly, some of the Wiis (mostly first-generation, according to bloggers) develop disc-read errors.

No biggie some say, as Nintendo is ’fixing’ this for free, in less that a week’s turn around. Some say that the issue is not the lens, but really a bad drive altogether. To this I inquire as to what sort of support system Nintendo has, in that they cannot produce enough Wiis to meet demand, yet they can replace hundreds of drives in less than a week?

The plot thickens. Why does Nintendo need my copy of the game to clean the lens, or even, at worse, replace the drive? Are they gonna buff out one layer of the dual-layer disc? I don’t think so.

Obviously, anyone with a legal copy of SSBB and an unmodded Wii will ship them for free to Nintendo, wait a nail-biting week, and get their Wii back, data and all ’fixed.’ So what happens to the modded Wiis or pirated copies that get the disc-read error?

Bam! Nintendo killed them, with a controlled distribution of a kill-switch in the form of a system update. If Nintendo knows how many Wiis are connected to the internet, and that almost everyone will purchase SSBB, it would be quite simple to randomly distribute a kill-switch to a controlled number of Wiis. Anyone who doesn’t ship it back can now be assumed to be in possession of some sort of piracy, albeit rendered useless with disc-read errors.

So if x percent of Wii owners get an error and y percent of those owners don’t return the Wii, Nintendo now has a good idea that they killed z percent of total piracy and that there are y pirates for every x of Wii owners.

I have to go pull another tube and wait for the Fedex guy.

canned air doesn’t work. i literally JUST tried it. that was a waste of 6 bucks -_-

Well it’s an interesting theory about Nintendo making a kill switch. If so, it’s pretty clever. Nintendo have a right to protect their copyrights, if pirates want to pirate, then they run the risk of bricking their console.
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Sorry to hear about your problem in Brazil. is the game officially out in Brazil or did you import? If you imported I can see the reluctance from Nintendo to help you, in their eyes, you shouldn’t have the game yet and don’t qualify for free fixing. I suppose you could try a CD lens cleaner disc from eBay.

You go to your region Nintendo site and follow the links.
Here is the usa one for example
http://www.nintendo.com/consumer/systems/wii/en_na/ts/gameSSBB.jsp

I’m pretty sure the Euro delay is so that the Nintendo Service Centers can be upgraded to cope with the demand for ‘Wii Lens Cleaning’. I suppose if Nintendo were to compress the data to fit on a single layer or ship the euro game on two discs it would probably negate the likely nightmare for us if our Wii’s need cleaning.

I am a Zelda fan and I tour apart my Wii and tried fix it that way.and it never worked. NINTENDO SHOULD HAVE A DISK TO SELL TO CLEAN THE LENS.
DO YOU AGREE?

Interesting.

YES YES YES!!!! Seems us chip owners are in LUCK!!!! The fix was easy, after the update my Brawl game worked instantly!!!!! This was definitely an attack from Nintendo! I am so glad I still get to watch movies in my room!

So for the people that DO NOT own chips, seems you were the small % that some how got the virus in your system, even without the chip. Nintendo should keep the hacking to the professional losers instead of ruining average folks lives!

Nintendo must give you a different updated firmware as the “cleaner of the reader” And thats why they can mass fix this issue. What idiots!!!!! I hope this virus they implanted in some new update will be revealed to the world!

I give Nintendo Props for stupidity! You really outdid Microsoft!

so does this lens cleaner work at all?

i brought SSBB on friday i just could not wait to play on it i put it in comes up with unable to read disk this made me mad what NINTENDO should of done is to supply somthing that cleans the console i have just wasted £37 on a game that i can not get working if i send it to nintendo then there is a risk of it getting it lost in the post if i open the wii up and rubbing alchol on the laser
theres a risk of it breaking i do not want to be getting my money back as SSBB is truely brilliant game ive cleaned every surface on my wii ive been blowing in it for 10 mins that nearly killed me still doesnt work ive yousd a hover to clean it lol that didnt work the only over choices i can now use is canned air or wii lens cleaner i appreciate any other people who can give me relavent info on to fix SSBB

I’m having more or less the same problem, with the difference that my Brawl used to work…
Here is the issue: I have a wiikey, and Brawl worked after I updated the wiikey to the newest firmware. I stopped playing with the wii just fine for a month or so and when I came back, brawl started to show the “unable to read disc” error. All the other discs, both originals and backups work fine, including a double-layer backup of brawl… any ideas?

My SSBB works fine, but my Zelda stopped working. I had it professionally buffed out thinking it was a scratch issue. It still did not work. I purchased a new/used disc from ebay and that one did not work either. Why only Zelda? I probably have 20 games, and they all work fine, including SSBB! I bought the CD/DVD lens cleaner, but it is not recognized by Wii. I really would like to handle this issue at home, and not send it to Nintendo. Any suggestions?

well ive been reading…i unlocked everyone on brawl and then it started to give me that error for every game even game cube games…i got a cd cleaner it didnt work because it thought it was a dvd and wouldnt run the disk…i mean i smoke alot maybe thats why it messed up and i got my wii the 2nd week it came out, but the theory on locking them….makes sense

Thres no dust or smoke issue, I had the problem with the SSBB, and a friend just bought a day ago his Wii, and I told him about this problem, and he tried to play it, and it didnt worked (Wii boughted 2 days ago!!!! WTF!!!)….. And, as someone says, Im in the third world, and I will try to get it fixed cause its warranty is still valid, but being in Mexico, wish me luck…..

Is that true that with the Wiikey and its last update SSBB works??

See ya!!