Wanna brawl?  Think again.

Nintendo’s recently released fighting game “Super Smash Bros. Brawl” where classic Nintendo characters such as Mario, Donkey Kong, Link and Pikachu battle it out is responsible for rendering a small percentage of Wii systems inoperable.

The game, which is a system-exclusive and the subject of a past Brick “Experience It” feature, has a double-layer disc makes the Wii’s disc drive work harder to run than other titles.  Nintendo won’t admit that the disc itself causes the disc read errors, instead stating on its Web site that the problem stems from contamination of the lens on the disc drive.

I personally witnessed this problem with my own Wii during a session of the single-player story mode where Mario fell into and bounced out of into a pit of spikes indefinitely while the number on the damage counter continued to increase.  I couldn’t stand watching Mario suffer, so I turned the system off and it didn’t boot up again when I tried to restart.

Wii owners can send their systems back to Nintendo for repairs, but if your warranty is up, it’s going to cost you.

– Thanks a lot, Nintendo.  My arms were getting tired anyway. 

WEB | http://www.nintendo.com/consumer/repair/repair_form_us_ssbb.jsp

Hey MeToo, thanks for weighing on the Nintendo conspiracy.  I haven’t mailed my Wii back to Nintendo yet, but I think they want to replace the old disc with a new copy of the game that may or may not destroy a repaired system. 

In preparation for this story, I did a lot of online research on various message boards and forums and discovered that this is apparently a widespread problem.  People have been trying to get the real answer from Nintendo, but why they won’t admit outright that Super Smash Bros. Brawl was too powerful for the Wii to handle in the first place and take responsibility by servicing all of their customers for free including the ones whose warranties have run out is a mystery to me.

But even in its early days as a home videogame manufacturer, Nintendo has had an arrogant air about itself.  Remember the restrictive third-party licensing policies of the 1980’s where other companies had to buy their cartridges directly from Nintendo back when the company was king?

One thing is for sure: the Wii is definitely a next-generation system.  The Smash Bros. breakdown debacle puts the Wii right up there with the 360’s red ring of death and the PlayStation 3’s overheating problems.  It’s deplorable that you can’t spend hundreds of dollars on a game system these days without some guarantee that it won’t be dead within a year or so.

Yeah… this is indeed a problem… it pretty much bricked my system… it would boot up to the Wii menu, but forget playing any games… Nintendo’s solution so far is to ask us to send it back to them, along with the game… What I want to know is that if the issue is with the lens being dirty, then why do they want to game disc as well? Sounds fishy to me!