twitter.com/chinesenintendo/status/1025262778875957248

twitter.com/chinesenintendo/status/1025416396346294274

According to various sources, Nintendo are bring Mario Kart Wii for the first time to China, on the Nvidia Shield TV. It will have 1080p support, a full official Chinese translation, the automatic Rosalina unlock from owning Super Mario Galaxy on the system, and perhaps the most fascinating thing for most people here, official online support with up to 12 players simultaneously in China across up to 12 Shield consoles.

This isn't the first time Nintendo have released upscaled Wii games on the Nvidia Shield TV in China, though this is arguably their most advanced project yet. Given the similar nature of the chipset of the Nvidia Shield TV to that of the Nintendo Switch, this could all be a big experiment to see how well that Wii games could perform on the Switch. If that's true, there may well be official online multiplayer for Mario Kart Wii once again in future for the whole world. Though I highly doubt they'd extend that support to the classic Wii console.

In the meantime, when the game releases in China, I will be doing everything in my power to obtain it, and will hopefully document the network protocol to see how similar it is to the Gamespy one, and general differences in the game. It doesn't seem like getting the game will be easy thanks to China's policies on gaming and the Internet, but it's theoretically possible. Wouldn't it be fun in future if crossplay between things like Switch, Shield and Wii were possible?

Watch this space...

This is true, though that's likely for demonstration purposes. It has been confirmed twice by two sources within Nvidia that the game does have the online support despite the state of the menus. Whether they've moved the option somewhere else, or those menus are simply modified for the show floor since people were allowed to step up and play the game, it still doesn't change the fact that they are indeed apparently reinventing the online multiplayer. Even if they don't, it'd be interesting to see what remains of the existing one that MKW used to have.

Yeah, the only sad part is that you're probably gonna be paying a fair amount of money for the privilege, unless you happen to own the Shield TV already. The Wii games on the system so far have been the equivalent of less than $10 apiece, but the console still is pretty hefty in terms of price. And there's a bunch of hoops you have to jump through (signing up to a Chinese website, obtaining and filling a Chinese digital wallet, and then possibly use Chinese VPNs/proxies to even access the shop, since it's digital only). I'm in the process of doing all those steps at the moment, I can detail them more once I have and confirmed my theories work, but it's not going to be very pretty.

Okay, so here are a bunch of facts I gathered about obtaining these Wii games outside of China (so far):

- You MUST import a Shield TV made in China. This can be done through a website such as jd.com.
- You cannot flash an English/other region Shield to Chinese firmware and expect that to work. It does support that, but the store won't let you buy games. China maintains a list of Shield TV consoles produced for/by China and it throws an error if you use one from out-of-region.
- You do NOT need a VPN or proxy to access the Chinese store or buy/play games.
- You will need an account on iQiyi, which has been described as the "Netflix of China", otherwise you can't even use a Chinese Shield TV. You cannot sign up for one on the console itself, as it doesn't accept international phone numbers. However, if you get the iQiyi app on your phone and use it scan the QR code the console presents during setup, the phone will prompt you to make an account, and this can be with an international phone number. After doing so, you will be able to re-scan the QR code and the console will accept it.
- The Shield TV requires WeChat or Alipay on a smartphone to buy games. These are two Chinese services that have features similar to PayPal (a digital wallet that you can add funds to, and you make purchases by scanning QR codes presented on-screen by the store).
- My brief attempts to use Alipay were stopped basically immediately: While downloading the app was possible, I couldn't enter the UK country code (+44) for phone number, so I couldn't sign up with my phone. I did note that the USA area code (+1) is available though, so someone from America might be able to get further than me.
- You CAN download and sign up for WeChat out-of-region, and access the wallet feature by using the search tool. It asks you to register a mainland China bank card, but you can actually just use any card. If it accepts it, you will be able to own funds in the wallet.
- WeChat does not allow you to add funds to the digital wallet from an out-of-region card, the card more seems to be used for ID and to verify that you are allowed to own funds. As such, actually adding money is difficult, but there are online services (such as Micredits) that allow you to effectively pay a person in China some USD via PayPal, then they add you on WeChat and transfer a balance of RMB.
- Despite all of this, that doesn't necessarily mean you can PAY for the games on the Shield. I was unable to, it got stuck on "processing" as if it were going to work, then never did. To resolve this, I actually sent the money and a picture of the purchase QR code for Super Mario Galaxy to the owner of the ChineseNintendo Twitter account. I don't know how willing he'd be to help random people all the time, but this how I got around the problem. If you are going down the approach of sending a QR code to someone, make sure it doesn't hit the open Internet because embedded in it are a fair few sensitive details, such as your phone number.
- The Shield TV has HDCP encryption, so even if you do ALL this then get the game, if your intent is to record or stream it, most capture devices won't be able to. You will need a device that strips HDCP. Since nobody is legally allowed to make something like that, the best way to get around this is to buy a crappy off-brand HDMI splitter. It is quite likely that a device like that will accidentally strip HDCP when doing the passthrough.
- You must remain connected to the Internet when playing games. Whenever a game is booted, it will check on launch to see if you are actually allowed to play it, then periodically throughout the game. If the connection fails, you will be kicked out.
- Saves for Wii games are apparently cloud-based.

I think that about covers it. Untested stuff:

- Obviously, online multiplayer on Wii games is untested, all current releases do not have it.
- Flashing the firmware to the Chinese developer build for extra debugging tools is untested.
- Spoofing unique parameters on an out-of-region Shield is untested.
- Rooting the Shield TV is apparently possible and with that you should be able to have some fun, but I have not yet done this myself.

With that in mind, you now know why nobody's put these files up on the 'net yet. Too damn complicated

We'll do our best, yeah. First I plan to enjoy the game I worked so hard to obtain, hahah



Oh, is that so? I will still probably try it later anyway. I would really like to find some way to do all this without relying on a Chinese contact. Maybe it's time I got an account with the Bank of China