"@ares: as far as i know, the wii freeloader has NOTHING to do with piracy. Also, the piracy horse has been beaten to death so many times I don't even understand the point of saying that "piracy isn't cool". Thank you captain obvious."

I said that cuz I leave in a country (Brasil) where 99% of the games are pirated and there is a bunch of plp that don't give a damn about it... I have more than 60 downloaded wii games (I won't spend a penny in a censured manhunt for example, just buy original AAA games like SSBB, Wiifit and I'm planning in get no more heroes or zack and wiki).

Freeloader is made from the same tring (Trucha) that makes uncensored manhunt or the mario kart pal I was using before I got my mario kart ntsc, it is not homologated by Nintendo, so it is illegal (against the Wii "EULA") and everybody knew that if some day a trucha-bug fix would disable freeloader (and since two months ago we already knew that nintendo had IOS37 to do that, they were just testing until now).

for god's sake.....why are they doing this.....

i don't see me updating any time soon... :P

i knew it, i read the part where they were talking about deleting game saves that might corrupt the game or w/e and i knew they were talking about the twilight princess hack and i had a hunch about the freeloader too....damn

If I remember correctly, Nintendo's fixes for these hacks were already there in a firmware update late March, a few days after the Freeloader was released. There were just not activate yet because the menu itself wasn't updated to the new firmware.

It was obvious the menu will be updated someday and the Freeloader would then stop working. Anyone who bought one after this late March update should have been aware of it.

When I saw the first few lines of description of the update saying it updated the menu, I knew that was it (although it doesn't affect me as I don't own a Freeloader or ever used any hacks).

It's perfectly normal Nintendo fixes those hacks. Some already manage to use them to pirate Virtual Console and WiiWare games. And eventually such hacks could lead to some cheating, which would be really bad for online competitive stuff.

Can't believe you guys are surprised - it really was inevitable.

As they move more into online gaming, its going to be critical for them to ensure no warez software runs on Wii units.

I hope they crush piracy 100% - forever - and maybe games will come down in price even further.

How is that at all a meaningful analogy.. one that makes sense would be:

This is like someone buying cookies from a cookie factory, rather than waiting 6 months for it to finally get to the cookie store for double the price.

That said.. i knew this would happen at some point in the near future, and i bought the freeloader knowing that,  now i'll have to sell brawl and start it again with the pal version.. that is, when a good update for wii actually comes along

How does a freeloader=piracy? Your still buying the game, just not from your region.

sorry shams, but you're completely wrong here. Guess what this update doesn't effect at all? Yes, that's right. Piracy. It is still perfectly possible to run pirated games on the latest firmware. It only blocks perfectly legal (in Australia, anyway) uses, such as homebrew and region free play. Piracy is still just as big an issue as before and this firmware update has done absolutely nothing to slow it down at all.

It is a stupid update from Nintendo, there are no two ways about it. There is no justification for this, except "Nintendo doesn't want you to import games so they can rip you off by charging you twice as much in other countries". At least they can rely on the law to help them with piracy, region free play is perfectly legal so they have to make it as hard as possible.

fuck you, Nintendo.

Freeloader uses the same bug that let you run homebrew from the CD, things like "Guitar Hero 80's"... bug fixed, freeloader screwed.

@ bloody swamp - In march Nintendo added the IOS37 to the system, and it still disabled. What they did this time was upgrade the IOS30.

http://hackmii.com/ - they "discompiled" almost all upgrade (the twilight part of it), you can see what nintendo realy did... they just put some small programs to block or delete illegal stuff... not very hard to clean it...

AHAHAHAHHAHAhahaha, thats a good one. If piracy stopped tomorrow, why would they reduce prices? Those who already buy games at the current prices will continue to do so and those that still want to play games will have to pay the current prices. Why reduce the amount you can take in once you've removed part of the competition?