- Hey y'all, Scott here! You know what I love about video games? Connecting a controller,
parental controls, airplane mode, screen burning
reduction, auto sleep, and that's it. It's a brand new console,
want to play a game? No! You ever just turn on a game console, stare at the menu screen,
and not know what to do? Playing a game takes a lot of work. I just turned on my X-Box to get my thumb something to do for five
minutes, keep them stimulated. It's like, I get the
feeling that I'm bored, but I'm too bored to have a preference of what to do with that boredom and I have too many choices
of what game to play, so I just end up not playing anything. But see some game
consoles have you covered if you need to wean your thumbs, why not nurse them on system settings? (button clicks) Hopefully there's nobody
living inside of this thing. Pre-installed software. It's like an activity
book for elderly children. Originally, if you turn
on your game system without a game in it, you'd get- (high pitched static) I thought I was gonna see a clock. Now you get a fancy ass menu. (shouts) Sharing now takes longer to enter a game. What used to take a flick of a switch, takes a few more button presses
and far more self-doubt. But having a menu system
actually allows us to have far more options than ever before. Internet connections, setting
up calendars, holy- (bleep) But of course, these
are mainly just options. What about applications
included just for fun, you know, opening up the Nintendo DS and seeing a little
option called picto chat, You can draw whatever you want in crotches and the Nintendo 3DS
up the anti quite a bit featuring fun mini games
to play that were just automatically included on the system, you didn't have to download
or install anything. You could play Face Raiders,
AR GAMES, StreetPass, and on top of that, you had
other features like a camera, and audio recorder,
even this little thing, where you could write your own notes. It was nuts. However, the system with a menu setup and pre-installed software,
I remember the most fondly will always be the Nintendo Switch. (button clicks) Yeah! The Nintendo Wii is a close second, this thing had such a fun menu
to explore back in the day, mostly due to the Wii Channels it housed. Calling them channels was definitely to make them feel more like TV stations and to give us a false sense of security, but these were applications for the Wii and this was one of
the first game consoles to have a cavalcade of
pre-installed goodies to sniff, which made productivity a bitch. I got places to be but
that damn forecast channel is calling my name! Oh. So when we turn the
Wii on, we're greeted to- I never read this,
warning, health and safety before playing read your operations manual for important information
about your health and safety. Wow, I never would have known. Is this really necessary every
time you boot up the console? I mean, yes it's, I don't want to get soon necessary if somebody decided I
didn't see a warning screen, I'm going to eat my (bleep) Wii. But actually reading this
text, it says nothing. Hey, here's a warning about
your health and safety, read about your health and safety. Unless it's time to hit
the a button to proceed. (bright musics) I'm home. This is the Wii menu, it's
got the rounded rectangles in the static, the music
that's not really music, the button orbs of (bleep)
it's got one of those. The Wii menu is an
excellent user interface, just by looking at it, you know
exactly what it's thinking. Many game consoles at the
time had UIs that were, I don't know, honestly, a bit confusing. I mean, once you start
fiddling around with them, you get it but the Wii was
instantly understandable while maintaining some depth. But you know what, I never liked? This little section. Of course, standing here,
it looks fine, nice even. But then when we go between
the different screens, like, am I the only one that thinks
this animation looks weird? Like, the perspective
of where this section is in relation to this
section makes me squirm. To those who said, gosh,
I wish Scott bitched more. Well, there you go, I
don't like the shape. Each Wii channel is supposed to represent a television channel, kind
of like you're in a studio or a security office with
a bunch of TVs on at once. Empty slots for more
channels, have the Wii static, and if you want to
customize where things are, just grab an existing channel
with the a and b buttons and join the resistance. I always liked the stock setup though. The Disc Channel, Mii Channel,
Photo Channel, Shop Channel in that order. Well, let's go through all of these starting with the Disc Channel. No! Discs! Would have thought and they're mobile. This is what we'd like to play
whatever games in the Wii. Of course, for the Wii
models with GameCube slots we see a GameCube disc thrown in the mix. I like when it reads the
disc, we seem him spin and if it doesn't read it,
we get a really nice (bleep) When Wii disc loads up, they almost always have
these fun splash screens with music and animation
on the Wii menu itself. But it always bummed me out
that with the GameCube games, they play the little
GameCube's startup jingle and show the logo, but it's not animated. Like, come on, you couldn't show the full GameCube startup animation here? It's also crazy annoying,
how if you want to play a GameCube game, you
can't control the Wii menu with a GameCub controller. You have to use a Wii Remote
to select the disc channel and then swap over to the game
controller to play the game. There's no reason for this. If you plug a class controller
into the Wii Remote, you can control the menu
with just the analog sticks. Why can't you do that with
the GameCube controller? The Disc Channel is the worst! Of course, with models of
the Wii that don't feature GameCube support, the Wii
disc is all by itself here. Again, (bleep) this channel. Well, let's see if whatever's
to the right of those thing, can top it. (bright music) Is this a revolt? The Mii Channel, easily,
one of the biggest wastes of time to ever indulge in. And I mean that in the
nicest way possible. So, first up the Mii name is brilliant. Flipping over a portion of the Wii name, to make something completely different. Now, you could flip the other half but I don't know what a
screaming W is gonna do for you. A Mii is a virtual
representation of a you. With the Mii channel, we
have limitless possibilities to make our Mii look like our me. As long as the mouth
doesn't go bigger than this. The Mii Channel was a game in itself. Sure, it really was nothing more than a simple character creator, but with how social and
accessible the Wii system is, it's just plain fun to
sit down with friends and whip up some quick Miis. You can start with a look-alike face. I don't know anybody who did this. Yeah, you can put together
the face of your dreams. You can make real-life
people, real-life fake people, or none of the above. One of the most fun things
to do is to pick a word and make a Mii out of it. I really take Mii making seriously. One of the best compliments
somebody could give you is, "Damn! Your Mii is pretty hot." And when we save the little
thing, we can name them, give them a birthday, favorite
color, turn on sharing. We're mingling as it's called. I never did this either,
but if I really cared about the Mii I made, yes, of
course, I'm open to polyamory. You can label it as a favorite of yours, which boils down to the
color of their pants. Yeah Dad, you're going in
the rest of the pilot now. Tan Dad, that's going in my favorites. All right, final question. Oh, do we want this Mii to mingle? I swear to God, if I
can crossbreed my Miis. Actually to mingle Miis,
you'll let this Mii go to your friends and Mii Channels and appear in the Mii Parade. What's the Mii Parade? (playful music) That. So, when you save your
Mii, they're plastered in the Mii Plaza. Purgatory, if you will. You can organize them,
grab them by the head, mutilate, or just kill them. And it covers all bases. So yeah, we can arrange
them alphabetically, by favorites, color, gender. We can only have 100 Miis,
which is pretty bogus, but we can store a Mii in Wii Remote. That's barbaric. I've never done this. It's definitely so then
you can bring your Miis over to your friend's Wii, by connecting your Wii Remote. But making Mii is so quick and easy, I just don't see the point. We could send me Miis to friends, exactly what I want to
receive in the mail. A (bleep) person. As previously stated,
here's the Mii Parade, which is supposed to be
this giant conglomerate of Miis you sent to the Mii Parade and Miis your friend sent
over and all they do is walk and you can speed them
up and also give up. Let's not forget you can
connect to the Nintendo DS. Now, why would we do that? To use Miis in the four Nintendo DS games that use the Miis, of course. To be fair, this feature
is far more useful with the Nintendo 3DS. This is how you transfer
Mii to that system, where it used Mii far more. And after the Wii, most Nintendo systems utilize the little avatars and had their own meme makers. And while they all had more features and were more robust creation tools than the original Wii application, the Mii maker peaked on Wii. On the 3DS, that's a
handheld, you're in the corner playing that system by yourself. That's no fun to create characters on. The Wii U, not bad, but
they separate so much of the creation experience between the TV screen
and the gamepad screen. It's not nearly as communal as using the pointer on the Wii. It feels much more like
a singular experience. I'm depressed when I
make Miis on this system. And then on the Nintendo
Switch, it's so fun. The Wii's Mii Channel
has a lot of features that went barely utilized and
has quite a few limitations, but it is still, by far, the most fun character creator out there. It has so much personality with
the music and the Mii Plaza, and the Wii Remote's pointer,
makes it so intuitive and such a blast to
create Miis with people in the same room. Well, it's gonns take a
lot to follow that up. (bright music) And this is a lot, the Photo Channel. Funny story, the Wii has an SD card slot. Now, what can you do with it? The Photo Channel. So we can import our digital camera or cell phone photos, via an SD card or we can take a look at photos left on the Wii message board. Yeah, the right dot. I loved looking through
my Wii message board. I mean, all it pretty much did for me was tell me how long I played
my Wii on that day, so at this point it's basically
a wall of hieroglyphics. Some games would send a
hearty congratulations to the Wii message board for doing things, or you could just straight up
send certain pictures to it, like your list of
accomplishments and Mario Galaxy. You could also use it to
send messages to friends. I never learned to do that. I mean, back in the day my friends and I weren't too keen on
swapping Wii info to do this, so I never got to experience
a lot of that side of online connectivity. But I still like going on
the message board to ask, "What the hell am I doing?" But those pictures on the message board, could double as pictures to
abuse in the Photo Channel. This is honestly such a
well done application. I mean, for the time
being able to show off any photos or videos on
an SD card on your TV, like this was pretty wild. You can even play a slideshow
with all the photos, with all different kinds of
music, including your own. I know what I'm doing in my funeral. Oh my God, the fun option! We can add some filters here and go in and doodle all over it. If we move the Wii Remote closer and further away from the sensor, but we can increase and
decrease our brush size and stickers and scissors and a nuke, this is basically a new version of Mario Paint from the Super Nintendo. In fact, many elements
of the Photo Channel are direct references to that old game. And then we can create a
puzzle out of our photo, which is just a blast to
do with images like this. (bright playful music) Give me a second on this one. I love the Photo Channel. It was such a fun way to
experience your photos. You know what wasn't a fun way to experience your photos? The Wii Shop Channel. The worst photo experience on Wii. What's better than the
Photo Channel, nothing, but on the Wii Shop Channel, we can download even more Wii channels. If it were 2009. Yeah, that's an issue with a fair amount of Wii Channels now. They require the internet
to not only download them to your Wii system, but also access. And with most of the Wii's
internet access being shut down, we're a little thing
I like to call (bleep) Thankfully, I have a
wonderful thing called the time capsule, with old footage of the Wii Shop Channel on it. Yeah, this is great. The Wii Shop Channel let us purchase and download classic
virtual console games, brand new downloadable only WiiWare games, and obviously more Wii Channels. Most of the downloadable Wii channels were free of charge though
some costs a small fee. Specifically, the Internet Channel. A surefire way to browse
the internet on the Wii. Let's get down to it. I bought a used Wii off of ebay, that I clearly saw, still had various Wii
Channels loaded onto it. If you boot up Wii mode on
a Wii U, for some reason, they got rid of access
to the photo channel and on my old personal Wii, I don't have a lot of
these old channels anymore for some reason. This one had all kinds of goodies on it. Like the Internet Channel, or at least a trial version of it. This would cost you 500 Wii
points or five US dollars. Was it worth it? Who pays for a web browser? I believe eventually he
went full-blown free, but I remember paying for it and at the time, it was pretty cool. Much like viewing photos on the TV, viewing the Google home
page, now that was magical. It wasn't a very powerful
browser, nor was it good but it did the job. YouTube worked on it. And back in 2008, that
was one of the few ways to watch online video on your TV. But the thing is, browsing
the internet with the Wii was a total gimmick. It was just a neat little novelty, which didn't make a ton of sense. The only things you could really
do on the Internet Channel was going on websites
like Wikipedia or CNN. You couldn't do fun things
like, play flash games, use more elaborate websites,
which at that point why use your Wii to browse the web if you can't do fun internet stuff on it? You are basically limited
to reading articles. So why not use your computer? To be fair, various sites were created with the Internet Channel's
limitations in mind and with those, you
could play simple games, listen to music, watch
videos outside on YouTube. There was still a decent
amount you could do with this channel. Now, is it usable today? No and surprisingly, yes. The Internet's aged a
lot in the past 10 years and most webpages are too much for the Internet Channel to handle. I mean, even back then, they were too much for the Internet Channel to handle. I can't tell you how many times I got this out of memory error. Not only now, but back in the day. You just have to keep reloading
and hope for the best. However, it still does technically work if you throw the softball. I was able to go on Google. And next up we have Channels
that need no introduction. The Forecast Channel, the News Channel. Okay, news and forecast are no more. No wonder nothing's
happened the past few years. These two Channels were pre-loaded on my original Wii when I first got it. And they, they what? They what? Gave news and weather forecast. Good. So ever since summer of 2013,
WiiConnect24 was discontinued. This was a feature of the Wii, which allowed it to continuously
connect to the internet while in standby mode,
basically letting the forecast and news channels update,
allowing you to receive messages from friends, getting
system updates, all that. I never knew the blue
light that would pulsate from the disc slot was letting
me know I received a message. Well, you think that means
we can't access these Wii Channels anymore. Wrong! We can access
them with a hacked Wii. So, we can't access them. Yes, you were looking
at the one-time champion of too (bleep) stupid to use a hacked Wii. Listen, I wanted to play We
Dare, it was a European game. So, I hacked my Wii, tried
to load it through that, it would get past the Ubisoft logo. Freeze, I ended up just
buying a European Wii U. If I can't do something as
simple as play a European game, how do you expect me to play something that doesn't technically exist anymore? Well, I can sure as I'll try, there's a fan continuation
of WiiConnect24 called, RiConnect24. Let me see if I can handle this. I can just looking at old footage. The Forecast Channel. Gave you the weather, you
could check out this globe, and the overall user
experience was quite detailed for a simple weather forecast. These Wii Channels are
almost like precursors to smartphone apps. But in many ways, they're
just as feature rich, if not more so. I mean, look at the News Channel. Yep, that's the news. Similarly to the Forecast
Channel, it uses the same globe. You can spin around to
find what's happening around the world and even put together a slideshow
of the biggest articles. These two Channels aren't
nearly as fun as the others, but serve their purpose and
if Nintendo really wanted to hit home that these
applications were Channels, for whatever reason, it just made sense to have news and weather incorporated. But what about the election? Everybody Votes Channel was
a channel all about polls and it still works! I mean, it would be updated with new polls to participate in all the time. But now all it can do is
read back data from polls you previously took part in. Like I said, this was a used Wii I bought, so I can use this to get some insight into the past owners. Like, find out how long they think they can hold their breath. I won't look I'll respect their privacy. Well, the Everybody
Votes Channel is usable. What about the Check Mii Out Channel? It's not even downloaded. Why did these people
download everybody votes but refused to download Check Mii Out. This channel really took
the idea of people making really elaborate Miis and ran with it. Letting people upload their
Miis for others across the world to download to their own console and also participate in Mii contests. I downloaded a couple from back in the day that these two channels were
neat little distractions, but I only used them a couple of times. There's only so many hundred
ways of Mii can wow me. And after voting on a few polls, I kind of just stopped caring. But then, there was the Nintendo Channel. A channel dedicated to
showing off trailers for Wii and Nintendo DS games. Even offered demos for Nintendo DS games. You could beam to the
hand of which was crazy. I played the demo for personal
trainer cooking that way. Because I just didn't
know if it was for me. Plus Nintendo hosted their
own show on the service called, Nintendo Week. I mean, again, for the time, having all
these videos available via your Wii console was really
cool, but how do you do it? Well Nintendo pre-loaded,
the Wii plus Internet Channel on some Wiis showing the
benefits of connecting it online. I never had this channel on
my Wii but it just so happened to only be a four minute long video, where you'd entered it and
that exact video is available on this promotional DVD I have, thank God I was gonna (bleep) blow it. - [Woman] Did you know you can connect your Wii console to the internet? - Yep! It's just a simple infomercial on pretty much everything
we just talked about. Is it worth getting pissed about, if it was never pre-loaded on your Wii? Yeah, but at least owning it
on DVD, I can play with it. So that's pretty much all of the Wii Channels that were available, except, that Wii Fit Channel. You can install this through running Wii Fit in and allow you to weigh yourself and check your stats
without putting the disc in. Marker Channel. Same idea
installed through Mariokart. We let you check in with your online sets, without popping the disc. Wii Speak Channel. You could only download
this to your download code offered after buying a Wii Speak. You could then talk to other
friends with Wii Speak. I only talked to people
who only speak anyway, so this was perfect for me. Jam With The Band Live Channel. A channel only available
in Europe and Japan for the DS Game Jam With
The Band it let you play the game's audio through the TV speakers. The Rabbids Channel. A channel installed to rabbids go home. It was like, check me out channel but with rabbits you
could post your rabbit and raid out the rabbits,
it was (bleep) pointless. Netflix, Hulu plus, YouTube,
Amazon video, Crunchyroll, even though this channel wasn't available under Wii channels and instead
was available under WiiWare. Metroid Prime 3 Preview Channel, which was only available
for a limited time in and loads of channels
that weren't even close to releasing in my neck of the woods. Television, Friend Channel, G-guide, basically a TV guide developed by HAL laboratory, only in Japan. The digicam, print channel, only in Japan basically, the photo channel,
but through Fujifilm, you could order prints of your photos. Today & Tomorrow Channel
in Japan and Europe, some kind of fortune
telling horoscope stuff. Wii no Ma Channel, only in Japan. A video on demand service with
exclusive content for Wii. Demae Channel, only in Japan. A channel that let you order relay food. BBC iPlayer Channel,
LOVEFiLM instant Channel, Kirby TV Channel, but of course, there was The Legend of Zelda: Skyward
Sword Save Data Update Channel. There was a game breaking
bug found in the game and since Wii, could barely
even spell the word update. They had to release a
Wii channel to fix this. For uses that didn't have the internet, Nintendo would have them send
their Wii system in Jesus. Then there's the Wii U Transfer Tool for transferring your info
from a Wii to a Wii U, like that this cute Pikmin animation and bringing your stuff over. It totally makes up for them
never bringing over to me. And that's pretty much every Wii channel. Sure, if you're playing on a Wii U, there's the Wii U menu channel, takes you back to the Wii U menu. And then, there's the
Wii menu manual channel, but I don't take labeling
anything as a Wii Channel lightly. The Wii gave me hours of enjoyment, even when I wasn't playing a game and I have these Wii
Channels to thank for that. Now how many hours in total? (bright music) Oh my God. Me using the Photo
Channel can finally drink. (bright playful music)
I wish Scott bitched more
Shame Scott doesn't talk about hacking as a way to get online services and features back for older consoles more when he talks about old consoles with online, but I'm glad he mentioned Riiconnect24 here
The bit after the weather channel shut down was pretty funny. All in all, this was more entertaining than I expected it to be. Now I'm wondering if when the PS5 and Series X comes out he'll make another video on the home screens.
On this season of Scott the Woz, Scott slowly descends into further madness.
I used to do that same thing making an all white puzzle on the Photo Channel as a kid lol
Nice
When he showed the color bars, the sound was a wii crash