Not that getting some hand-crafted 'brew on the Wii was any great feat to begin with, but the kindhearted individuals over at WiiBrew have decided to make things even easier. The newly released Wii Pack Generator is, in its own words, a "web-based utility that allows you to select from the most recent, up to date, and high quality homebrew for your Nintendo Wii and create a custom pack." Everything you select will be beautifully organized into a .zip or .exe file with the correct structure for easy extraction onto your SD card. Any remaining doubts you had about giving this a go just flew out the window (really, we saw it go down), so check the read link to conquer your fears and start really living.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Finally, Engadget editor Paul Miller's prayers have been answered -- in the form of a homebrew SNES emulator for the Wii. It's no secret that Paul is eerily obsessed with the SNES, and now he can get access to all his favorites (import or otherwise) with another Wii tweak. The well known emulator SNES9X has been ported to Nintendo's money maker, and it even includes support for the Wiimote (there are plans for future implementation of the Classic controller and two-player game modes). We're assuming this is all part of the much-loved Twilight Princess exploit, though they're a bit short on detail. Hit the read link and start breaking Nintendo's heart ASAP!

Alright, things are starting to get really good with these hacks. Just after seeing a GameCube / Wii Tetris, Linux build, SNES emulator, and the first homebrew MP3 player for Nintendo's money-maker, we're getting a totally radical, native Genesis / Megadrive emulator for the console. Coder-extraordinaire Eke-Eke has created not only the first of its kind for the Wii (and GameCube), but it's also the first ever that's capable of playing Virtua Racing, a milestone in Genesis emulation. This latest feat utilizes the same backdoor Twilight Princess hack, which is proving to be the best thing that happened to Wii development since... well... ever. Hit the read link and check it out yourself.

[Thanks, Craig]

Make no mistake, Nintendo's Wii has been hacked to pieces, but there's nothing like an all new method that keeps the soldering iron residing in the utility drawer to get us all hot and bothered. Unfortunately, what you can see in the video waiting after the jump is only a proof of concept at the moment, but it does show that Twilight Princess can be exploited and homebrew code can be booted directly from an SD card. Also of note, certain versions of the game -- most notably, RVL-RZDE-0A-2 USA -- have reportedly been found to not play nice with the aforementioned hack, but hey, it's a start. Click on through!

[Via Exophase, thanks zshadow]

Behold the magnificence, rejoice in the glorious Triforce-ocity -- the Wii mod of Wii mods has arrived. We're not really sure there are even any points of potential improvement in this Zelda shrine, unless of course it could magically turn into Link and wanted to be friends with us. The word from comments is that the fancy sword and shield are from the collector's edition of the Twilight Princess score, and it turns out you can remove the sword and flail it around like you don't even care. The best news is that you can make this Wii your own, since it's already up on eBay, waiting to dive into the arms of the highest bidder -- just look out for the mind-melting embedded Zelda theme music MIDI when you hit up that read link, death comes to all who hear it.

[Via Nintendo Wii Fanboy]

Update: Apparently eBay was giving our good-hearted seller a bit of a hassle, so he had to relist it with proper permissions for sale on behalf of a charity. Check out the new listing here.

We knew we should have taken that call from Miyamoto the other day, but our loss was TIME magazine's gain, because the Mario and Zelda creator was looking for someone to, wouldn't you know it, take the upcoming Wii for a little spin. TIME's five page article is so full of interesting deets that we barely have room to scratch the surface here, but suffice it to say that Lev Grossman not only reports on his hands-on experiences with a number of games, he's also able to get inside Nintendo's head, if you will, and tease out a bit of the methodology behind what some hardcore gamers perceive as the company's madness (Wii? those controllers? Nintendogs?). As for the actual gaming, Grossman got to play some tennis (the sensors even allow you to add spin), slay some dragons (brandishing the controller like a sword in Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess), and bring those wacky Warioware minigames into the third dimension (think: fishing, weight lifting, cooking, etc.). Geez, this thing sounds like so much fun that we may just skip the Sony keynote this afternoon and see if the folks from Nintendo will let us play with their goodies.