Did you play the Monster Hunter Tri demo? If not, don’t bother. It sucked.

Okay, that’s subjective, but it’s definitely fair to say that the Monster Hunter Tri demo did not accurately represent the full game. Imagine if Rockstar put out a demo for the next GTA game that had you inside of a car as soon as you boot it up, and had you drive from point A to point B to point C, and then it ended. Or, if Nintendo put out a demo for Pokémon where you get in two gym battles with a pre-set team of pocket monsters. Sure, that would show off a little of what it’s like to play those games, but it would do almost nothing to give you a sense of what the full experiences entail. It would also make those games look pretty boring and crappy. That’s exactly what the Monster Hunter Tri demo did for Monster Hunter Tri.

The real game isn’t just a series of moderately clunky fights against a few different kinds of made-up dinosaurs. The real Monster Hunter Tri is something that takes the structure of Zelda’s side-quests and combines it with aspects of Shadow of the Colossus, Pokémon, and World of Warcraft. That equation in the Monster Hunter series is the hottest thing going in Japan right now, and with Monster Hunter Tri, the series has a fighting chance of replicating that success in the Western world.

Does Monster Hunter Tri have what it takes to convert you into the Church of Jaggi? Hit the jump to find out.

Monster Hunter Tri (Wii)
Developer: Capcom
Publisher: Capcom
Released: April 20, 2010
MSRP: $49.99 

First off, a quick word about the genre that Monster Hunter falls into: though it may look like a standard adventure game, Monster Hunter is very much a sandbox series — a Japanese sandbox series. Unlike Western sandbox games such as GTA and Saints Row, Japanese sandbox games tend to focus on expansive, open, largely unpopulated (by humans, anyway) spaces that provide tons to do, but where nothing ever needs to get done. Collecting stuff, leveling up, exploring, and getting away from real-life humanity is the priority here; doing crimes in bustling recreations of real-life cities would just be missing the point. Dead Rising, Animal Crossing, Shadow of the Colossus, The Wind Waker, and No More Heroes are just a few examples of games that fit the profile of the Japanese sandbox game, but when it comes to to providing that special mix of freedom and escapism, Monster Hunter Tri outdoes them all.

The game puts you in the role of a (you guessed it) person who hunts monsters, but Monster-Hunter-and-Gatherer is more like it. You start the game by creating your character in a Mass Effect/Mii Channel manner. From there, you are introduced to the Monster Hunter World via some beautiful cut-scenes, meet some villagers, leave town, and do as you please. Wander the wilderness, go fishing, catch some bugs, mine precious stones, and oh yeah, beat a bunch of dinosaur-looking things in the head with a hammer (or sword, or multiple other weapons) until death, then cut into them and take their remains back to town, and repeat. That’s your average game of Monster Hunter Tri.

There are a lot of things you can do around town, too: pay cat people to cultivate plants and bugs for you on a little farm, cuddle with a pig, send some sailors out on expeditions, decorate your house, forge new items, change weapons and armor, change your hair style, and, of course, buy stuff. It feels like the old, pre-story-focused days of the JRPG: go to town, rest up, hit the road, kick ass, come home, and lick your wounds. It’s nothing revolutionary, but it works.

Part of that comes from the constant supply of little moments to enjoy. The game provides a constant stream of different items to find, monsters to fight, hidden areas to discover, and surprising interactions with monsters. Oh hey, what are these little cat people doing in this cave? Doing a dance? Awesome. Wait, now they’re smashing me in the head and stealing my stuff? Bastards!

That’s just the cute stuff. You’ll also come across giant bugs, dino-sharks, and most often, huge, huge dragon/dinos that own the world of Monster Hunter with an iron fist. This is the most intimidating and beautiful creature design this side of Shadow of the Colossus. The way these monsters look, act, and think is endlessly entertaining. As you play through the single-player mode, new areas open up as well, and though none of them are particularly massive, the land never runs out of surprises. Swimming is a big part of the game, too, with large underwater areas to explore. One second you’re “ooh-ing” at the massive beasts, the next you’re “aah-ing” at the marvelous backdrops. It’s a non-stop awe-fest.

The team working on the latest Zelda title has been cited for their respect for the visuals of Monster Hunter Tri, and how they are aspiring to make a game as attractive. Though like many Wii games, the textures in Monster Hunter Tri can look a bit janky when seen extremely up close, there is still no denying that the attention to detail in both the environmental and creature design is top of the class. When you’re running through the mountain pass at night, while shooting stars fly overhead and a herd of large, beautiful animals gallop en masse in the valley below, it’s nothing short of magnificent. It’s especially fun when loads of different types of monsters end up hanging out together in the same area. You’ll have a raptor-like Jaggi biting the ass of the heavily armored Rhenoplos. So much care and attention was put into this game’s world; you’ll really feel like you’re living among the beasts.

Just as much care was put into Monster Hunter Tri’s gameplay. Though you don’t capture and train monsters like you do in Pokémon, you do make weapons and armor out of them, and the level of detail and variation in the “evolution trees” of each weapon/armor is staggering. This game has tons of different weapons and armor, with the potential for elemental properties for added flair. There are seven types of weaponry in Monster Hunter Tri: sword and shield, great sword, hammer, lance, switch axe (an axe that can turn into a sword), long sword, and bow gun (light, medium, and heavy barreled). All seven play very differently from each other. They almost feel like Street Fighter II’s original seven characters (or eight, if you count Ryu and Ken as two different ones) in their level of variation.

The single-player mode is perfectly engaging. For storyline, we get a low-intensity tale of a town that needs saving from a giant sea monster, among other natural enemies. Your real motivation in the single-player comes from curiosity about the game’s world, and amassing a plethora of cool weapons/armor/etc. That’s all good stuff, but what makes Monster Hunter Tri really special, especially for the Wii, takes place online. The game allows you to take on quests with three other strangers at a time, chosen from a cast of thousands of online strangers, with no need for friend codes.

That’s right, Capcom somehow got around Nintendo’s friend code system. There is a little warning before entering the game’s online city about not giving out your phone number and address to people you meet online, but that’s it. There’s no more protection than that. Teaming up with strangers of different levels of experience is the best way to see new and exciting stuff in the game, and to pick up some awesome new gear along the way — all of which can be brought back to the single-player experience. You can interact with strangers with in-game texting, a Wii-compatible keyboard, or the Wii Speak speaker/microphone combo. The in-game keyboard is a little clunky, and doesn’t allow for pointer controls like those found in Animal Crossing: City Folk, but other than that, it’s pretty much flawless. Also, no lag.

This lack of online protection and hand-holding is surprising, and speaks to the game’s overall philosophy. In fact, that’s the one thing about Monster Hunter Tri that may turn people off. This game barely tries to help you out. Unlike many games these days, your character doesn’t have a built-in healing factor, and there is often a high price for carelessness in combat. The game also isn’t shy about throwing over-powered monsters your way before you’re tough enough to take them on, or letting you sign up for a quest that you have no chance of completing. After the initial set of quests, you’re rarely given much direction or instruction as to where to go or what you’ll need to succeed, which gives the game a certain believability not found in many online-intensive titles.

The most striking area where the game leaves you on your own is in actual combat. There is no lock-on, which really forces you to hone your skills on your own. Knowing which weapon is right for which quest will be sure to make or break the career of many a monster hunter, as will the drive to learn the behaviors, strengths, and weaknesses of the monsters you’re hunting. It all takes place in real time. Like in Resident Evil 5, there is no pausing the action in the inventory screen. Dodging, charging up attacks, setting traps, retreating, accessing items in your inventory, barbecuing some meat, all while a fire breathing dragon with giant cobra-heads for wings stomps around and scares the crap out of you, is a required skill. To pull off all that, the game’s controls will need to become second nature.

That’s another one of the game’s strengths: control options. Not only does each weapon control and feel differently from each other, but there are three overall control schemes you can choose from before starting up a game. The Wii-Remote-and-Nunchuk scheme is definitely playable and for motion control enthusiasts it may actually be preferred, but it really feels like the game was built to be played with the optionally-packed-in Classic Controller Pro. The Classic Controller gets two different control schemes: one that’s button-intensive, and one that’s analog stick-intensive. Mini review-within-a-review time: the Classic Controller Pro is awesome — it’s more light and comfortable than any other analog pad on the market, Wii or otherwise.

The last thing thing you really should know about Monster Hunter Tri is how truly endless it feels. As a wild guess, someone may be able to speed-run through all the quests in the single-player in 30 hours or so, but that’s being really generous. For people who want to get the most out of the game, it’ll take much longer than that to really see what the game has to offer. It’s common to hear a Monster Hunter fan say they’ve put hundreds of hours into the game, and they’re still making gains and seeing new things. Capcom has already promised to make new quests available online free of charge. People pay a monthly subscription fee for this stuff in Japan, but we get it for free. 

Fans of Japanese-style sandbox games need to buy Monster Hunter Tri. The only bad thing about it I can think of is that it really doesn’t do anything to try to win over today’s lazy, lock-on/healing factor-reliant action gamer. Also, the game’s local co-op mode is a little lacking. It only allows you to join with one local player and take on one of the game’s “bosses” inside an arena, disallowing the option to explore or go item-farming. Other than those tiny complaints, everything else about the game pretty much nails it. For $50 ($60 with the Classic Controller Pro), Monster Hunter Tri provides a World of Warcraft-quality experience without the $14.99 monthly subscription. That makes Monster Hunter Tri the best value going in MMORPGs today. Add to that a more-than-adequate single-player mode, and you get a…

Score: 9.0 — Superb (9s are a hallmark of excellence. There may be flaws, but they are negligible and won’t cause massive damage to what is a supreme title.)

Connecting an external hard drive to your Wii to backup and play your games is a simple way to keep expensive discs out of harms way, decrease game load times, and organize your collection with swanky cover art. Here’s how it works.

Last year we shared two guides with you that other people had written—the original and a revision—on how to back up and play your Wii games from an external hard drive. Unfortunately, like many things on the internet, the guides faded into the digital night (read: they were taken down). Setting up your Wii with an external hard drive is a wildly popular topic, however, and since the old guides went offline, we’ve received daily emails on the topic. In response to the demand, here’s our own complete guide to setting up your Wii to play games from a USB hard drive.

When laid out screen-by-screen this guide is quite lengthy, but the process itself only takes about 10 minutes start to finish—if you’re not stopping to take lots of screenshots and write a tutorial along the way! This guide will show you how to activate an exploit on your Wii to allow more advanced Homebrew software to run, how to setup and format an external USB hard drive to play nice with your Wii, and how to manage the process of backing up your games and displaying them in cover-flow inspired style. When you’re done your games will be load fast, be immune from scratches and mishandling, and be displayed in a way that will make your friends envious.

Before you delve into the project why don’t we take a peek at this video demonstration of the interface to help you decide if it’s worth it—it’s so worth it, but who’s going to say no to a video tour?

Ready to call in sick and spend the day setting up your Wii? No? Watch the video again.

Precautions and the Necessary Hardware:

Before we get started, let’s review some necessary cautions and the tools we’ll need. Anytime you mess around with a piece of closed hardware like a Wii and start monkeying with the guts you risk bricking your toy. Have we ever bricked a Wii? No, despite modding Wiis and all sorts of consumer electronics, we’ve never bricked anything. Is it possible to brick your Wii? Yes, the risk is always there and you should proceed with appropriate caution and respect for the process. Every step and every tool used in this entire guide can easily be looked up on Google if you want to read more about it.

Precautions provided, let’s take a look at the tools you’ll need:

• An SD card (this is a perfect job for an old 512MB or 1GB SD card)
• An external USB hard drive (Wii games take up around 2GB on average, so select a drive according to your collection)
• A Wii with the Homebrew channel installed (We’re not going to recap how to install the Homebrew channel in this tutorial, so check out our step-by-step guide to installing Homebrew on the Wii without Twilight Princess if you need to Homebrew your Wii.)

Getting Started by Softening up Your Wii’s Defenses:

If you have an older Wii with an out-of-date menu system (3.2 or lower), you can skip this section about the Trucha Bug since your system still has it. (If you’re not sure what version you have, click on the Options button in the lower left corner of your Wii’s main menu and then on the Wii Settings icon on the right hand side of the screen; the version number is displayed in the top-right corner of this screen.) If you have a newer menu system, you’ll need to read this section.

The Trucha Bug is just a code vulnerability that existed on early versions of the Wii operating system (referred to in Wii-hacking documentation as IOS). As of the 4.0 Wii menu update, the Trucha Bug was eradicated; luckily for our hacking purposes, you can easily reintroduce it in order to exploit it.

Download DOP-Mii v12 and extract the zip file onto your SD card keeping the folder structure intact. Pop the SD card back in your Wii and launch the Homebrew channel.

Run DOP-Mii and select Install I0S36 (v3351) w/FakeSign from the menu:

The next series of screens look similar to the above screenshot. On those screens you will apply—press A to say yes to—the ES_Identity patch, the NAND Permissions patch, and then you will download the patches through your Wii’s internet connection like so:

After the screen above, DOP-Mii will ask you if you want to restore IOS15 to v523. Again, click A to confirm that you would. DOP-Mii will complete the modification and kick you back to the Homebrew channel. Note: In some instances this tweak can invert the Homebrew screen, a strange quirk. You can fix it easily by reloading the Homebrew installer.

The next step is to introduce a new IOS to your system. Download the cIOS installer here. Extract the zip file, again keeping the folder structure intact, to the /Apps/ folder on your Wii SD card. Pop the SD card back in the Wii and launch the Homebrew Channel:

Launch the cIOS installer. On the initial screen use the right and left Wiimote directional pad to switch the ISO number to ISO36. Press A to confirm:

On the next screen, use the keypad to select Network Installation. Press A to confirm. The cIOS Installer will churn away for a minute or so and then confirm a successful installation. Press any button to reboot the Wii.

Prepare Your External Hard Drive and Install the Boot Loader

At this point your Wii is ready for all the fun Homebrew antics you can throw at it—Homebrew by itself is really awesome, but Homebrew with a custom IOS under it is even better. At this point we’re going to explain how to prepare your external hard drive to work with your Wii, so grab that external drive, plug it into your computer, and let’s get cracking.

We need to go grab copies of the USB loader and WBFS manager we’ll be using. For this tutorial (and on our personal Wii consoles) we’re using USB Loader GX—a great USB loader packed with features and eye candy. We’ll also be using WBFS Manager. WBFS Manager is Windows-only, but don’t be discouraged if you’re running Mac OS X or Linux. Visit this list of WBFS managers to pick out a WBFS manager for your operating system.

WBFS stands for Wii Backup File System. It’s possible to use some of the more advanced loaders with NTFS formatted disks, but it’s dicey and not worth the headache. Stick with the Wii’s native file system for maximum stability. You’ll want to plug your USB drive into your computer and fire up your WBFS tool of choice at this point—for the tutorial we’re using WBFS Manager. Select your USB drive from the pull down menu and click the format button. Just like using the regular format tool this is serious business. Make sure you pick the right drive.

Although WBFS Manager is packed with features, we don’t need it right now for anything but formatting. You can revisit it later to backup your backup drive and other nifty tricks, but for now you can shut it down and unplug your USB drive from the computer and plug it into the bottom USB port—the one closest to edge of the Wii and the little rubber foot (the other port is reserved for games that require USB accessories like Rock Band).

Head back to your computer computer point your browser to the download section of the USB Loader GX site. If you’re on a Windows machine, scroll down to the bottom of the file list and grab a copy of USBLoaderGX_1.0_Installer.exe—it’s a simple application that will update and install the USB Loader GX files on your Wii SD card for you.

If you are grabbing them manually, go to the top of the list and grab the most current .DOL and .WAD files.—as of this writing that would be r929.dol and r929.wad. Place the .DOL file on your SD card at /apps/usbloader_gx/ and rename it to boot.dol and put the .WAD file in /wads/. While you’re at it download the USB Loader GX Forwarder here and put it in /wads/ also. You’ll need it later for the extra credit portion of the tutorial. Put the SD card in your Wii and boot back into the Homebrew Channel.

Launch USB Loader GX:

Looks lonely in there. Pop in a game and click “Install”. Depending on the game it can take anywhere from a minute to several to rip a game. Wii Sports, for example, is only 0.31GB in size, whereas Super Smash Bros. Brawl is 6.93GB. The average Wii game is around 2GB or so—though you’ll be surprised to see how many games are really tiny. After you’ve ripped one you might as well work your way through the stack in front of you. Soon your loader screen will look like this:

It’s not lonely anymore but it sure is boring looking. Press 1 on your Wiimote. This menu will pop up:

Cover downloads? Yes ma’am! The covers will download automatically—they’re stored on your SD card, if you’re curious. After you’ve downloaded the covers your default interface should look like this:

Clicking along the bar at the top of the screen gives you new layouts like the one at the top of this article and this one:

Not only is USB Loader GX a beautiful loader to look at, it has tons of features under the hood. You can favorite games to make a “Best Of” list or sort them by number of plays so your most frequently played games rise to the top. You can even set a parental lock so that children playing games on your Wii can’t load the Mature rated titles—do you really want to explain why your nephew is playing No More Heroes instead of Super Paper Mario?

Extra Credit: Put Your Loader on the Front Page

So far things are looking pretty good. You’re rocking Homebrew, you’ve got a USB hard drive with all your games hooked up to your Wii, and it’s all controlled by a beautiful cover-style loader. What could be better? Not having to launch the Homebrew Channel and then launch the loader, just to get to your games. Let’s put the loader front and center.

We’re going to need a few more tools so grab that SD card. We need a WAD manager, essentially a file manager for the Wii that handles installation bundles. You can’t go wrong downloading Waninkoko’s Wad Manager; you’ll find a copy here. Extract the zip file to /apps/wad manager/ and remember to rename the .DOL file to boot.dol. Throw it back into your Wii and boot into the Homebrew Channel. Run the Wad Manager. You should see a screen that looks like this:

Select IOS249 as the IOS version—it should already be selected. On the next screen select “Wii SD Slot” as the source device. The next screen should look like this:

Select the USB Loader GX-UNEO_Forwarder.wad, click A to install it. After the installation is complete, hit the home button on your Wiimote to boot back into the Wii. Exit the Homebrew Channel and on the main screen you should be greeted by the addition of the USB Loader_GX icon:

From now on whenever you boot up your Wii you’ll be one click away from your awesome collection in all its cover-flow glory.

Before we break from the tutorial we have some links to share with you. The following sites have astounding amounts of information about the Wii, modding the Wii, and the inner workings of the Wii. If you can’t find the answer to your Wii-related questions among them you probably won’t find it anywhere.

• Wiibrew
• Wiihacks
• The Complete Softmod Guide
• /Wii/ @ GBATemp.net

Have a favorite Wii-related resource? A great piece of Homebrew software to share? Whatever Wii tips or tricks you have up your sleeve, we want to hear about them in the comments.

Wait, what?

A woman from Manchester is blaming Wii Fit for turning her into a sex addict. 24-year-old Amanda Flowers fell off her balance board while playing Nintendo’s blockbuster placebo and claims that the stumble somehow turned her into a nymphomaniac. Seriously.

Amanda claims that she craves sex at least ten times a day. The slightest vibration in the air will give her the horn, meaning that all she has to do is feel her phone and it’s like Niagra Falls in her pants. According to Flowers, “It began as a twinge down below before surging through my body. Sometimes it built up into a trembling orgasm.

“With no cure I just have to try to control my passion by breathing deeply. Hopefully one day I’ll find a superstud who can satisfy me.”

Sorry, what? How can this be a real person? She’s talking as if she’s one of those fake letters at the back of a porn mag. Nevertheless, if she really does have this problem, I know of a certain golfer who might be able to help her out. Two birds, one stone.

Girl Falls off Wii Fit Board — Becomes Sex Addict [HotBloodedGaming]