If you want to make an omelet, you have to break some eggs.  Likewise, if you want to thwart hackers, you have to destroy some innocent gamers’ consoles.  Nintendo issued a firmware update for the Wii intended to get rid of those with hacked consoles.  Sadly, this offensive maneuver included some unintended splash damage, and some innocent players’ Wiis are ending up bricked as a result.

Posts on NeoGAF and Nintendo’s technical support site indicate that the firmware download is freezing, causing Wiis to crash with no way of rebooting them.  Nintendo has responded extremely quickly, offering free repairs for wrongly bricked Wii owners.

It should come as no surprise that hackers have already found a workaround, meaning that the only people who are being punished by the reportedly bug-filled update are innocent gamers who haven’t modded their systems.  I’m not one to tell companies to give up on rights protection or safeguarding their systems from hackers, but seriously, Nintendo, ya gotta do a better job than this.