Splatoon And Mario Kart 8 Online Services On Wii U Are Finally Coming Back

gameranx.com:

Nintendo UK has revealed that online services for Splatoon and Mario Kart 8 are returning to the Wii U after nearly half a year of outages.

Last March, Nintendo revealed that those online services would be getting shut down, because an exploit had hit the Wii U’s online services called ENLBufferPwn.

Yours truly experiences some of the consequences of the exploit, when I joined a Splatoon match earlier this year. At the start of that match, one team already had all of their ink dominating the map. I happened to be on the winning team, and noted that as I played the other team couldn’t kill us. The only thing the other team could do was spray their paint, but even the exploit added one last cheat that guaranteed we would get 100 % of the map, and win the match.

As reported by Video Games Chronicle, the way ENLBufferPwn works is that as soon as you connect to other Wii U players online, you would be able to take over the other players’ console and exploit code on it.

It should be noted that it was quite strange for hackers to go after a console that had long stopped being sold and manufactured. Comparably, nobody ever tried pulling a similar exploit on the PlayStation 3’s and the Vita’s online services, even if Sony had committed to keeping their stores and other services online after fan demand.

This was how Nintendo UK explained the outage on their official support page on the issue:

“In March 2023, Nintendo paused network services for the Wii U games Splatoon and Mario Kart 8 to address a vulnerability related to online play. The issue has now been fixed, and so we will resume online play for these games based on the schedule below. Please accept our sincere apologies for the extended waiting period.”

Nintendo UK