Whoa, My Wii Plays DVDs! Through Magic/Homebrew/A Pact With Satan

My first post as a Nintendork staffer was one decrying a version of the Wii that played DVDs, because I already have like eight DVD players in my house.

Honestly. I am surprised when something I own doesn’t play DVDs. I am looking at you, pillow. But, today I happened upon a really, really interesting Lifehacker article that walked me through the (actually quite scary) process of installing the Wii Homebrew Channel and the mplayer DVD player so that my little ol’ first generation, bought-on-launch-day Wii could play DVDs. I was skeptical about the process. I thought I would need to crack open my Wii, pore through it’s innards, and possibly use a soldering iron. But no, dear readers! I just needed an SD card, SD card reading computer, and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. I have all of these items. I backed up my Zelda save file on my PC (painless), and made my way through the tutorial. After about ten minutes of downloading and installing, everything worked exactly as advertised. The Wii Homebrew Channel is cute, and even has some little 21st century Nintendo-style music. I felt like I had violated my trusty little system, but when she started playing that DVD of Tron, I think she could sense her new power growing inside her. From here, I might start being a little crazy! I might install an NES or SNES emulator, and then HAVE NOTHING TO PLAY BECAUSE ROMS ARE ILLEGAL. I will let you all know how this goes! Try it out! Get messy, make mistakes. However, if this all blows up and my Wii commits suicide I won’t write about it here so you guys will all suffer my same fate. Suckers.