A Green Mushroom

I've been having a ton of trouble with my Wii U external HDD lately.  It randomly will disconnect and after playing with it and troubleshooting it for months I've come to determine that it's probably the fault of the Wii U and not the HDD. So I looked for a good solution, but didn't want to buy another external HDD with external power to just run into the same situation again Then I found some other people in forums having a similar issue and I was super surprised to see the recommended fix. Who would have thought the fix would be a cheap little flash drive?  I grabbed a 128GB flash drive as cheap as I could find it (which was very cheap) and moved all the games from the old HDD to the flash drive. Not only is it totally stable, it's also faster to load.  Weird. Anyway, if you run into the same problem maybe the same fix will help you.

In the last month my Wii U started having an issue.  It stopped playing nice with the external hard drive that I've had hooked up to it from day 1. I wish I never had to buy an external drive, but the "big" storage version of the Wii U that I bought is only 32GB.  That's like nothing in today's modern gaming landscape. I'm purely digital now with my gaming, I just don't buy physical media anymore, so it was the obvious choice to pick up one of Nintendo's recommended external drives.  Unfortunately, external drives are the only place I've ever had problems with digital gaming... and this has turned into the same thing. Now, the Wii U will randomly decide not to mount the external drive.  I could buy a new one and re-download all of my game that aren't on the internal storage (most of them) or I could just deal with it since the Wii U seems to be at the end of it's lifespan. All signs point to the Nintendo NX releasing next year.....

Yesterday Nintendo updated their Club Nintendo rewards and finally, for the first time, put up a good selection of games and accessories.  As of writing this, the site is still down because it can't handle the traffic.  That's what happens when you offer more than 100 different game choices and new physical rewards to a group of people that have been given 4-6 really bad game options each month for years on end.  Here's a full list from Reddit of all the reward offerings. This has only come about because the Club Nintendo program has been canceled and that's the sad part.  I hate to see it go, but this is a nice parting gift. I just wish they had all of these games available the entire time the rewards program was open.  They would have had many more people using Club Nintendo and responding to their surveys. While I'm sad to see it go, for now I'll just be happy that I finally have some good games to spend my rewards points on.  Thanks Nintend...

This was my weekend accomplishment.  After fearing that I would have to pay upwards of a couple hundred bucks for a new Xbox 360 I decided to do some home repairs.  Things went fairly smoothly thanks to helpful advice and diagrams on the internet. The problem was a dirty laser head, which is what I was expecting.  All I had to do was lightly rub the laser head with a q-tip a few times.  Then I fired it up and the system started reading discs perfectly again.  The sad thing is this would cost at least $100 and 2-3 weeks of time if I sent it to Microsoft and they did the exact same thing. The case was annoying, but after taking apart the plastic layer on the outside the rest of the process was simple enough.  A gaming console is just a specific type of computer, so if you've ever built or upgraded your own hardware you would feel right at home with the innards of a modern console.  If you have problems and are out of warranty like I am, don't be a...

 Dammit! Not Again... I'm on my 4th Xbox 360, which is bad enough, but now my current console stopped reading discs.  Neither DVDs or Xbox 360 games will even acknowledge that they're in the disc drive.  I'm out of warranty with Microsoft and I'm out of warranty with the Best Buy where I bought it (by 2 months). In all of my previous 360 console deaths I had a warranty with Best Buy, so I would take it in and they would give me a brand new console.  This time I'm out of luck. That means I can either pay $100 to Microsoft so that they can maybe fix it in 2-3 weeks, buy a new console for $300, or try to do some home repairs.  You bet I'm going to try the home repairs instead of sending my 360 away. It still works great for streaming Netflix and other videos from my PCs.  All of the games on the hard drive work too.  The only thing that stopped functioning is the disc reader. I'll dive in and try the old Playstation trick of cleaning the laser h...