My daughters were very excited to receive a Wii for Christmas. I knew that their grandfather was planning this, so when other relatives asked for gift suggestions for the girls, I said Wii games would be great.
Well, we’ve got the Wii up and running and all seems well. Until last night. They wanted to play Dance Dance Revolution. There seems to be no way to plug in the dance pad into the Wii box? Is this game not compatible with a new Wii? Is there something I am missing?
And if they won’t play, what should I do with an open-but-unplayed with DDR bundle? Is my only option to Craigslist it? These were sent by relatives across the country and I have no receipt.
Edited to add: Can someone move this to the Games forum? I thought I was there. Oops.
Happy to move it for you. Your best bet for quicker action on these things is to report your post (the ! in a triangle at the upper right hand corner). Not just for spam and misbehavior – you can report a post for anything that needs a mod’s attention.
Is it one of the newWii Minis? (I think they’re only available in Canada) Or is it the Wii U? If that’s the case, it would be missing the Gamecube controller ports.
If it is a normal Wii, it should have the controller partsunder this flap.
Have you checked that the pad can’t plug into the ports on the base/back-end of the wiimotes like the nun-chuck and classic controllers do?
The problem is BigT, no one was supposed to use the Gamecube ports on the Wii for new product, they were strictly there for backwards-compatibility. Nintendo can’t be held responsible for breaking the compatibility of a 3rd-party company’s hardware if it interacts with theirs in an unintended way.
DDR predates the Wii, it’s an arcade game that has been ported to just about every home console and seen multiple sequels; some of the pads being marketed for the Wii on Amazon are actually just repackaged Gamecube pads that aren’t even compatible with all of the DDR Wii games do to being old generation hardware.
Basically, the problem is with whichever company is making the dancemats. Note that the recievers for the Rock Band/Guitar Hero instruments use the USB ports on the back of the Wii (still there on newer models), for example.
None of the newer Wiis, regardless of color, have had GC ports for over a year. I think the last ones to include them were the ones with a Mario Kart bundle (which might have still been on shelves in some places a year ago, but would just have been old stock not yet sold). Everything from the New Super Mario Wii bundle on has been non-backward compatible.
Black Wiis were around before this change, so just going by color is no indication. Basically, if it was sold with a picture of the Wii on the box looking like a vertical tower with a stand, it’s GC compatible, if was sold with the picture on the box of a Wii laying flat with no stand, it’s not GC compatible.
There was a hardware change, in that no black Wiis will play burned discs, but unless you’re hacking the thing this is not really relevant. This change also affected white Wiis made after that point, so again, color of the system won’t tell you everything.
