I can now play Tyrian on my Wii. My life is complete. It doesn’t get any better than this, folks… Well, it could be better if I could actually save my game >_< Oh yeah, and getting out of OpenTyrian requires a Wii hard-reset 9 times out of 10 but come on, it's Tyrian people, TYRIAN! Arcade mode is actually quite fun. And hard. I forgot how hard this game is.

I used the Twilight Hack to install the Wii Homebrew Channel (HBC), and it worked first go, like an absolute charm. I remembered to back up my Zelda savegame first, and will restore that soon. Once HBC is loaded you really have no need for the Twilight Hack again.

There are some pretty neato apps for the Wii so far, but most only use the “fake Gamecube” inside the Wii, which means this really isn’t worth doing unless you have a GameCube controller. ScummVM uses the Wiimote which is impressive. There are also emulators for just about every Nintendo console before the Gamecube, so I ask: Why aren’t Nintendo jumping up and down? It’s obviously a huge threat to the Virtual Console. Maybe VC sales are just a tiny fraction of their income though so they don’t care?

But there’s still one thing missing and that’s DVD playback. My good ol’ Panasonic DVD player has recently carked it. I loved it to bits because it was region-free out of the box, and I have a lot of non-R4 DVDs. There is still no .elf DVD app that can be loaded with HBC, but Wii Miidia looks quite promising. I’ll be waiting for an official release, though; I’m happy to give everyone else the chance to brick their Wiis using the betas.

If anyone wants to borrow my copy of Zelda to get this going, let me know.