August 25th, 2023

Nintendo has finally ended maintenance on Splatoon 1. The game went under maintenance on March 2nd because of an exploit discovered months earlier and has been under maintenance for 5 months. Nintendo has ended the maintenance with a new title update to patch the exploit. This is the first update for Splatoon in almost 7 years, with the last one being from September 2016.

The version number is now 2.12.1. The final version of Splatoon.

Since there has been an update. The Squid Sisters announce that a new update has been released and to check the official website for details. Nothing new was added as the patch notes state that only the exploit was fixed. The official website doesn't say a drop about Splatoon 1 either.

The first rotation avaliable after the patch released.

Rotations in Splatoon 1 were 4 hours long, though the patch was released at the last hour of the patch. I played the first and second rotation on patch day. A lot of other people also got on and played too. These people probably were playing Splatoon 3 earlier that day, but wanted to come back to Splatoon 1 for the patch. It really felt like Splatoon was down forever!

Anyways, I like Splatoon. I don't know, but this was a little bit enjoyable compared to Splatoon 3 right now. It might be the burnout kicking in, but my time playing was really fun! The maps were really large!

Of course, there's some things that a lot of people don't like. One of them was how the quick respawn ability worked. In Splatoon 1, the ability would always be active, so you could kill a whole team and then die and you would be back in the game in 2 seconds. They nerfed the ability in the sequel, where the ability only activates if you haven't killed anyone during the time you were alive.

I remember a lot of people hating the instant specials. In Splatoon 1, there were a lot of specials that gave you invulnerability, such as Bubbler or Kraken. Unlike Splatoon 2 and 3, where specials gave you some frames of vulnerability, Splatoon 1 gave you invulnerability the moment you popped a special that had the trait. It's a free win for the small fights.

Despite everything, I still liked it.

One thing that irks me about this update was the announcement.

If further issues occur which make it difficult to continue supporting online play, we may have to discontinue the online play service for the Wii U games Splatoon and Mario Kart 8 at short notice.

This potentially means that if another exploit is discovered within these games, online support may be cut entirely. It seems upsetting, but thinking about how long this update took, it might be due to the resources needed to produce an update. The last Splatoon update was in September 2016, before the Switch was even revealed. They probably had to go find the old Wii U development kits, setup a development environment, make the patch, and get a team to test it. Add on to the fact that Nintendo is busy with future projects and don't want to put that many resources into a game with a playerbase of probably below 2,000 monthly players.

The scary part of this is that the amount of time left for Splatoon is unknown. All Nintendo stated was that it's possible for them to just shut it off if they feel like it. What's the possibility that there's a new exploit within the patch? When will Nintendo shut off the online service? Of course, there is the chance that there is nothing wrong and the online service goes on as normal. I guess we just have to live in the moment. It just seems pretty easy for them to fold and shut it down, especially since they really don't care about the Wii U at all anymore.

Ah... it seems like hackers are still an issue in the game though. I don't think they'll shut it down because of the cheaters, but just in case something as serious as the patched exploit pops up again.

All I can really close this part off is with this: I really spent my time with this game 7 years ago, huh. I can't get over that. It still feels like just yesterday I would be playing Splatoon after school.

Ring the alarm! We still got more Japan stuff. This time, we have stuff outside of the regular PlayStation imports.

Next, this black Wii system! The seller only confirmed that the console could turn on and listed it as 100 yen junk. There is an influx of 100 yen Wii systems, so I scooped this one up. You can go on Yahoo Auctions right now and look up Wii本体 and you will find a bunch of cheap Wiis. Of course, condition is all over the place, but there's a chance you might get a working one. I've seen so many systems go for 100 yen and people do not CARE for these systems.

This Wii is a little scuffed. A quick clean made the system look better, and I can easily ignore the scratches. I can't get upset at this, this Wii did cost less than a dollar. This system isn't a Family Edition console, as those systems have never released in Japan.

It arrived and I hooked it up. It turned on and showed the white system menu. It actually works. Please excuse the abhorrent brightness of the screenshots, my component cables aren't OEM and neither the DV decks or Elgato look good with it for some reason.

The previous owner left their copy of Mario Kart Wii in the system, and the seller didn't realize this and shipped it to me too. It appears this was the only game they ever played on the system, no save data for any other game exists.

They did play the hell out of it though.

"Today, I made a strange character."

Looking at the Wii Message Board tells me the last time someone played on this console was rather recent, with this last message being posted on November 28th, 2022. That's not even a year ago!

The previous owner never went online with their console. The system still has the Wii + Internet video and no existing internet configurations. The system was also on Ver. 4.1J, which was the latest version when the colored Wiis first released in Japan..

After checking everything out, I took a backup of the NAND and then updated to the latest version. Late Wiis are not compatible with BootMii as boot2, and all colored Wiis fall into this category. It's a simple process.

I like this Wii. I just realized now that all the mods I do to the Wiis I have can region-unlock the system. I could import some games, but I think I really only have any interest in the Taiko games. You won't see me import more Monster Hunter games. (I don't have the shelf space for more!)

I also got a PS1 memory card. It's a skeleton red card. It did come with a case and some unused labels, though I don't see any reason to use those. As usual, it's used and has some save data on it.

When plugged into my PS2, it shows some Dragon Quest save data as well as some Derby Stallion save data as the only data on it. That's on the surface though. The PS1 never actually deletes data, it just marks it as free space able to be overwritten. It wasn't until I imaged the card and put it through MemcardRex that I saw the deleted data.

The games listed are:

Biohazard 2 Clock Tower: The First Fear Chrono Cross Popolocrois II Total NBA 97 Valkyrie Profile

There's a lot of adventure and RPG game data in the card.

Also, here's a huge score! I got an Atari 2600! It's not the standard Atari branded version though, it's a Sears Video Arcade.

It came with a large number of Telegame cartridges.

I bought two Atari 2600 games years ago at Goodwill: Adventure and Frogger.