You may be aware that MDK2 has been ported to WiiWare for 1000 Wii Points (~$10). You may not be aware, however, that this is a shitty investment.

For starters, the game is available on GOG.com for $5.99. Now, I’m no Asian, but I’m fairly certain that five is less than ten. Also, games purchased from GOG.com don’t include any DRM, which means that you can copy the game files and install them as many times and on as many computers as you’d like. WiiWare games, on the other hand, are limited to the system they’re purchased on.

For seconders (which my spell checker is telling me is an actual word), the version just released on WiiWare has been gutted and maimed. Here’s an excerpt from an interview with Trent Oster and Cameron Tofer, two of the developers who ported the game to WiiWare:

We did some quick projections and knew it was going to be a tough job taking a 280 MB Dreamcast/PC game and crunching it down to 40 MB. [...] After we had gone as far as we could with compression, we started cutting content down. The music tracks probably got the worst of it and hopefully Jesper can forgive us for cutting up his brilliant music to fit under the limit. (Nintendo World Report)

If you’re going to buy MDK2—and why shouldn’t you? It’s a fine game—you have no excuse to choose the WiiWare version over the one available at GOG.com. If you’re reading this you probably have a computer, so that’s not an issue (unless you’re a Mac user, in which case you have far more serious issues that you need to deal with first). And MDK2 is over ten years old, so it won’t put any strain on your computer, yet it’s been updated by GOG.com’s team to work with newer operating systems. It’s also the full game without any concessions made to fit an arbitrary size limit.

There are just two reasons that I can imagine someone coming up with to buy MDK2 for WiiWare: 1) They want to play it with motion controls, which is a stupid reason because everyone knows by now that motion controls were a stupid idea—even Nintendo appears to be abandoning the concept. 2) They like to keep all of their games on one system, which is also a stupid reason because only idiots care enough about that sort of thing to pay extra for worse quality.

So, before you decide to buy MDK2 for WiiWare, stop and think for a minute: what are you willing to lose?

This has been a public service announcement brought to you by The 34th Dimension and the delicious taste of Dr. Pepper.