KC’s Log: The Ark

And lo, KC looked to the sky and it was a broken sky. Darkness tore it asunder and he knew the time of renewal was at hand. Thus, KC herded the pokémon two by two onto the ark so they might weather the storm and find a brighter future when the storm subsided.

Okay, enough of that bible talk. What happened last week had me worried about the safety of quite a few of my mons. For about six months now, my Wii has had a problem where bright backgrounds broke up and made black splotches in games. This had an effect similar to black pixelated vortexes tering open the sky, just like the contaminated fields in .hack.

I used to think this was caused by my old TV, but since recently buying a new one, the problem persisted and I knew the Wii was at fault.

Luckily, I bought my Wii less than a year ago, so it was still under warrantee. Nintendo is very accommodating in how easily you can set up a repair on their website. I didn’t have to pay shipping, just box it up and slap on a sticker. But when it came time to actually pack the old girl up, I suddenly thought in a panic, “What’s going to happen to My Pokémon Ranch? And what about my Miis other saved data?”

A while ago I sent Nintendo a faulty DS and they simply exchanged it for a new one. The same thing happened with my busted PSP. So I did the only reasonable thing: I unloaded all my ranch pokémon back onto my DS (I barely had enough space). I couldn’t get the ones Haley brought there, or the ones I had traded her, but I guess they could be considered acceptable losses should anything happen. I also stored a bunch of Miis on my controllers (10 can be saved on each, no memory card needed).

The biggest problem, however, was the fact that you cannot copy your Battle Revolution data onto a memory card. Neither could I copy my Mario Kart data for that matter. This ticked me off, but I couldn’t help it. So then I packed up the Wii and sent it off wondering if I would ever see my ranch again…

While Nintendo says the process may take 2–6 weeks, I actually got my Wii back within five days. Nice work guys! I was also grateful that instead of just replacing the Wii, they fixed the problem and sent it back with all the data in tact. The ranch survived the storm, and now my pokémon are all back in Haley’s gentle care.

I didn’t think much of it at the time, but at one point the Nintendo site asks you if you are concerned about keeping your data. That may be the only reason I didn’t get a brand new Wii and my ranch was spared. So while my caution was not necessary in the end, it is still feasible to lose everything due to some simple carelessness. Hence…

KC’s rule #3 : A trainer always knows where his pokémon are.

Do you know where your pokémon are?

[Nintendo.com ]