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So I’ve been waiting for this little game on the Wii called Super Smash Bros. Brawl. You may have heard of it. And being an Australian, I’m left with the choice of waiting six months while everyone else tells me how awesome it is, or I could go the filthy, filthy pirate method. I opted for the latter.

Now this is the first dual layer game for the Wii. And as a result, many people are having trouble even reading the original disc. The Wii is even more particular about burnable discs, so I tried to find a decent brand to burn my copy. For some reason, I had this idea that Imation were a fairly reliable brand, so I picked up a pack of 10 for $30 from Officeworks. Not a great price, but I’ve seen worse.

After patching the game to run as well as possible on a PAL machine thanks to a few people over at GBAtemp, I burnt it and waited the forty-five minutes it takes for a dual layer disc. Popped it straight in the Wii, and, oh noes. “Unable to read disc”. For what it’s worth, this is the same error many people have been getting with the pressed retail discs, so it wasn’t necessarially my modchip or even the discs.

So I thought I’d pick up some better quality Verbatim discs anyway, because the Imations could be bad. Drove around for an hour and finally found some, for $5.70 a disc. Yikes. However, the first burn gave me a few errors before finally loading and working fine. It was still a bit of luck to actually get it to read though.

At this point I thought to myself, let’s see if Nintendo’s claim of dirty lasers causing errors is actually true. Because like some others, I’m not completely buying that argument. After all, wouldn’t they just get dirty and need cleaning again? And this is happening on brand new consoles. I dug up the trusty tri-wing screwdriver, popped the case and cleaned the laser with a cotton bud. This seemed to make things better (but still not perfect) with the Verbatim discs.

Now this is where it gets interesting. I’ve heard that adjusting the pentiometer that controls laser power can help with dual layer discs because it’s set too low from the factory. I dug up a guide, gave the pot a slight tweak and put one of the Verbatims in that had been more of a handful. Sure enough, it read no problems the first time. And second. And third. And the other Verbatim disc worked as well.

And the Imations that didn’t work at all? Well, they now read perfectly fine too.

It’s pretty clear that this “dirty laser” is just a scapegoat for the real problem with dual layer discs on the Wii. But the good news is it’s easily fixed if you’ve got a tri-wing screwdriver, jeweller’s screwdriver and around 30 to 60 minutes of spare time and don’t care about your warranty anymore.