A little publicized fact back when people were arguing whether Xboxes or PS2s broke down more was the Gamecube's incredible reliability. Nintendo builds pretty good hardware, and given that the Wii isn't trying to do anything outragous with its hardware, it stands to reason that it'll probably be way more stable than anything MS or Sony are putting out. 360s bursting into flames, anyone?

I found this in a blog elsewhere..check it out.

Your thoughts? Personally, I do believe a Space World event isn't out of the question, though.

Oh. I rotated it; you just flipped it forward.

Meh, Nintendo's done this sort of thing a lot, and nothing's ever actually been revealed in any of them. The Wii went into mass production at the beginning of July, anyways, so it's a pretty safe assumption to say that it will come out sometime from early October to mid November.

That is not to say that Nintendo is purfect, as far as I have seen it they seem to suffer from little design errors that become annoying (the Gamecube's oversized B button, The DS's Start button placement, [apparently, I have yet to prove this... thought with a iLite coming, I might] The DS Lite's hing issue, the N64 controler, SNES's overheading issue... etc.).
Granted, this is not to the scale of the Xbox recall, 360's heat issues (they are using a CPU with a historic heatting issue (a modified PowerPC chip, known on Macs of yesteryear), you would think that they would keep that in mind), The Japanese PS2 recall, and many heating issues with the PS2-post development, the PS2 reading issue, etc.... but nintendo does have it problems with systems even on the first shipment.
I can't say that the first set of Wii's will be perfect.

Well, I don't think these would be considered malfunctions, as these are designs that are kept throughout the life of the systems (well, mabye except for DS, if you count DS Lite as a fix for that error). These are things that weren't "fixed" after the first batch. Oh and I'm assuming you meant the cube's A button there, since I don't see why anyone would be complaining at the B button being big.

As a side note, I did hear that SSBM did go through minor revisions following the initial release, so later versions have some glitch fixes and minor character balancing stuff. This kinda makes me hesitate when I'm thinking of buying a new game on release date, even though I probably won't notice it as a casual gamer.

As there is WiiConnect24, this problem should be solved in the next generation. No need to buy revised versions, no Capcom special editions with two additional costumes. At least if Nintendo gets it right.

That would require the Wii to be capable of burning discs, Prime.

And THAT would require enough memory to hold at LEAST 1.5 gigs of data (going by the assumption that the Wii discs will be as large as Gamecube discs), along with whatever patch data is downloaded. Oh, and then there's the patching application itself.

I could MAYBE see it happening if they had a REALLY good way (maybe streaming data onto the Flash memory, patching what needs to be patched, and burning it before moving onto the next section?), but it's just simply more realistic to assume that patches won't be downloaded to the Wii.

Not necessarily. I think you'll be able to download patches either to the flash memory or - more likely due to the limited space of first mentioned storage media - SD cards. After a game is started an implemented patch check application burnt onto the game discs is executed and the load pointers will be set to the updated SD card versions of maps/polygonal models/music/programs. Otherwise WiiConnect24 would be pretty useless: New downloadable content is basically nothing else but a patch.

Oh right, I forgot about that. They DID mention that the service would be used for extra stuff and mabye patches. I guess I'm just not used to my console games requiring patches and whatnot.

Don't know about the latter.
But yeah, console games and patches usually don't go along with each other in one sentence. :D
WiiConnect24 could really change the way we play and experience games.
But since I'm a PAL kiddie I don't really have a problem with always getting the most recent and bug-free version of a game (see a lot of Konami's games, for example).

They'll be larger. I'm fairly confident it's been confirmed by now that Wii disks will be the same size as those on the other consoles, though GC disks are still playable.