A YouTuber has come up with a quick and affordable fix if your Wii U is bricked or has a dreaded error code.
A couple of weeks ago, reports emerged that Wii U consoles might be irrevocably bricked if they’re left unused for too long. According to several forum threads pulled together by the website Exputer, numerous Wii U owners have retrieved their consoles from storage, booted them up, and have been faced with nothing but an error code. We wrote about the situation over on whynow earlier this month.
These reports are purely anecdotal, of course, and at present it’s impossible to know how many of the 13 million Wii U units sold have the same issue.
YouTuber Voultar, meanwhile – who’s something of an expert when it comes to repairing and modifying consoles – has done a bit of investigating. He recently purchased five second-hand Wii Us, each with a 160-0101 and 160-0103 error codes, and found a way to fix them using some software and a cheap Raspberry Pi Pico.
According to Voultar, the fix worked on all five of his broken consoles, though he does point out that he was unable to find a Wii U with the exact NAND (or flash memory) issue described in those stories from a couple of weeks ago. If you do have a bricked Wii U, though, then Voultar’s fix could be worth trying – you can pick up a Raspberry Pi Pico board for about £3.60, so it’s a relatively cheap and simple process if you follow the instructions in the video.
With the modding community working on fixes like this, it could mean that those earlier reports of dead, unfixable Wii Us were somewhat premature.
You may want to fire up your Wii U fairly soon, anyway, since Nintendo’s on the cusp of shutting down the eShop that services that console and its handheld stablemate, the 3DS. The eShop is scheduled for permanent closure on 27 March, which means there’s just a few days left before some digital-only titles vanish, potentially for good.
In anticipation of this, YouTuber The Completionist has spent the past 12 months downloading every Wii U and 3DS title from the eShop – a process that cost him over $22,000 of his money to complete.
Now, most of us lack the time and money to embark on a project like that, but if we had to recommend just one Wii U eShop exclusive, we’d have to point you in the direction of Affordable Space Adventures. It’s a wonderful little puzzler, and makes imaginative use of the Wii U’s Gamepad.
