...Nintendo.

This past Sunday (November 15th, for those of you keeping count), Nintendo released a new Mario game. New Super Mario Bros. Wii is a blast. It is the first straight up Mario game that is playable by up to four people simultaneously. Sure, most of the old school 2D Mario games were two player, but you had to take turns. The new one is a side-scroller that you actually play with your friends.

It turns it into a bit of a free for all. Your characters all physically interact with each other, meaning you can be nice or not so nice to your fellow players. If you want, you can carry your less gaming-inclined friends through a particularly difficult level. Or if you want to, you can toss a shell at them or pop the bubble in which they return to play after dieing while they float over a pit. If you read any of the dozens of reviews of the game out there, you'll be told numerous times that it will ruin friendships. I can totally see it, even though I've only played it with my wife so far, and she hasn't left me over it...yet.

So, you might be wondering why I'm happy I'm not Nintendo. I mean, the Wii and DS (in all its incarnations) simply print money. An old-school 2D Mario game released for the holidays (with a direct sequel to Super Mario Galaxy rumored to be dropping in January) is like money in the bank. Well, I'm happy I'm not Nintendo because the security on both their system, the Wii, and their games (New Super Mario Bros. Wii) is terrible. Almost to the point of it being embarrassing.

Without making a single hardware change to the Wii or opening it up in any way, you can hack it to run "homebrew" software, which is simply home made software designed to run on a hacked system. A lot of available homebrew is harmless, simply adding features to the Wii that it lacks in its native form, like DVD video playback, or XviD playback from a USB hard disk or thumbdrive. Some of it is free games that people have thrown together. They generally aren't as much fun as professional games, although with some of the shovelware that's been showing up on the Wii, some homebrew games are actually better than some you can pay for.

Some homebrew, however, is more detrimental to Nintendo. There are a number of programs that will allow you to run a "backup" disc of a Wii game. A backup disc, is, of course, a DVD copy of an original retail disc. You pop a game that you totally bought from the store and didn't rent from Gamefly into your PC, put a blank DVD-R in your DVD burner, and copy away. A normal Wii wouldn't play the backup copy, but a hacked Wii will do it with little trouble.

Even worse for Nintendo are USB loaders. With a USB loader, you don't even need a DVD burner. You can plug a USB hard drive into your Wii, put a disc (again, which you own) in the Wii's own disc slot, and use the Wii itself to copy the game from the disc to the hard drive. Then you can play it directly from the hard drive without the disc being anywhere near the console. Not only that, but you can rip an "image" of the DVD using your PC and simply transfer the image file to the USB drive that way. This, of course, means that you could, in theory, find an image of a game that somebody else ripped and posted online, plop it on the drive, and play a game you never bought. You'd never do that, though. That's wrong.

Not only is their hardware insecure, it would appear that their software is not very secure either. New Super Mario Bros. Wii had not one, but two level editors (unofficial, of course) announced on the web on the same day it was released. I, for one, could not be more excited
disgusted by this behavior. Why would I want to be able to play not only the levels Nintendo gave me in this game, but total remakes of SMB1, 2 (the Japanese one, of course), and 3, and Super Mario World. I would never, ever make an image file of my legally purchased copy and modify it to include levels that were made by rom hackers online.

Never ever.