Prevent Big Headaches: Back Up Wii Saves to SD Card

[This post was guest blogged by Heather, of GeekMomMashup.]

My family had a Wii crisis recently. I am sharing this experience with you now as a cautionary tale, so you can prevent this from happening in your own home.

My daughter just turned three, and she loves to “play” on the Wii like the rest of us. She is usually happy to hold a spare Wiimote while someone else plays a game. She is skilled in playing point, click, and drag type games on the PC, and she has figured out how to point and click through the Wii menus, too. Recently, she was left alone on the couch with the Wii all to herself. I was in the kitchen, and I could hear her talking happily to herself. She was clicking through menus, checking out the Mii channel, the weather, etc. This went on for maybe 10 minutes, and then we turned off the system and had dinner.

The next day, my boys (ages 8 and 6) turned on the Wii to continue their work on Super Mario Galaxy. They had nearly finished the last level, and went to load their saved game when… “What? Where is it? MOM!”

It was gone. We checked our other games, too. I had finally achieved Pro status on Wii bowling, but now my sparkly ball was gone. My husband had spent countless hours shooting virus-infected baddies to complete about 75% of Resident Evil 4, but now? Gone! We checked the Data Management screen. Every saved game had been deleted. Aaaahhh!

Apparently, the little princess had clicked into the Data Management menu, and deleted all of the memory blocks with saved game information. Boy, was she thorough! We found later that she had also deleted some of our extra Miis. The moral of the story? Don’t let this happen to you! Unfortunately, memory blocks cannot be locked with parental controls. So, if you value the time you’ve spent on your games, you might want to back up your saves onto an SD card.

You don’t need a special Wii SD card, as the very same kind you use for photos will work just fine. To save you the trouble of looking up the instructions in your Wii manual, here is the abridged version of:

How to back up saved Wii games to an SD card.

1. To reach Wii Settings and Data Management, select the Wii icon on the bottom left corner of the Wii Menu.
2. Select Data Management from the Wii Options screen.
3. Select Save Data from the Data Management screen.
4. Select the Wii option to view all data saved in the console’s internal memory.
5. Select the data you want to back up; then select Copy.

Big Wii headache averted! Don’t forget to store your backup SD card in a safe place.

Wiikly Wii Releases - 4-6-08

Welcome to the this week’s edition of the Wiikly Wii Releases! Here we will let you know about all the great Wii titles coming out this week and give you some information to help you pick the game that’s right for you. When applicable, we’ll choose one game to be the “MyWiiNews Pick of the Week,” a game that stands out among all the others as the title that takes the crown for that week. Without further ado, let’s look at what’s coming out this week.

MiniCopter: Adventure Flight

Aksys – April 8th

Back in the late 1990’s, miniature transportation simulators were all the rage. You had your Mario Kart, your Crash Team Racing, some Diddy Kong Racing, and countless other cutesy simulators that seemed to just saturate the gaming market. Why exactly we needed 15 variants of the same generic path racer was beyond me, but such were the times. With a dearth of mini-venture games out at the moment, who better than Aksys to bring us our much needed MiniCopter fix?

As expected, the helicopters in MiniCopter are smaller than usual, and tend to sporadically take off and adventure the surroundings. If this sounds like it’s right up your alley, it probably is, as the Wii is nothing if not perfect for silly minigames like these. Throughout MiniCopter, you’re the pilot of an RC Helicopter whose interests include shooting things and picking up the resulting coins. The ‘copter is controlled by tilting the remote in any of the four cardinal directions, making for a unique flying experience.

Videos are scarce on this one, so take a peek at these photos to get a feel for the piloting to be had in this MiniCopter adventure.

Baroque

Atlus – April 8th

Oh, Baroque. I want nothing more than to be excited for a wonderful remake of one of the few worthwhile Sega Saturn dungeon crawlers, but I seem to have suddenly come down with a bit of fear. Baroque is a game that is likely to beat you up many, many times before you ever get a chance to get anywhere, and isn’t likely to be an impulse buy for many gamers.

You see, Baroque is a roguelike; a game that features many random elements, such as dungeons and items, that force you to figure out everything as the game progresses. While this is great when it’s done relatively fairly (see: Shiren the Wanderer), it can be extremely taxing when not. With Baroque, you’re told extremely little at the start of the game, and it’s often necessary to die for the storyline to progress, making exploration occasionally difficult at best. It’s certainly not a game for everyone, but for those looking for a dungeon-crawler with some old-school challenge, Baroque will certainly whip you into shape.

Check out the intro video below to get a feel for the game and see if its dungeon is a dungeon worth crawling through.