Question:
Dear Big Picture Big Sound,
One of my seven wonderful (no, really) children has apparently taken upon himself (or herself) to "inadvertantly" scratch our prized Wii Sports game disc to the point where it won't even load in our Wii console. I've checked around and apparently you can't buy a replacement - the game ships only with a new console. And I am not buying a new console just to get a replacement game disc (assuming I could even find one).
Do you have any suggestions which do not involve selling the child on eBay?
-Jake
Answer:
Hi, Jake,
Ah yes, kids. Gotta love 'em. But selling the child on eBay won't bring playability back to your video game. Normally I would say make back-up copies of your children's CDs or DVDs and put the originals in a safe place, but this is not really possible with Wii discs as they're not in a standard DVD or CD format. They can be copied via some complicated methods, but then you'd need a modified console to play them and I'm not even going to go there.
Fortunately there are a number of disc repair services out there which will run your damaged CDs, game discs, DVDs, HD DVDs and even Blu-ray Discs through a cycle on one of their pro machines for a nominal fee. We recently used Azuradisc's disc repair service and saw excellent results. A few of our discs were so badly damaged as to not be repairable (some of these had transparent spots), but they were able to fix some pretty badly scratched discs including a few that could not fixed by the VenMill machines we reviewed.
The surprising thing is that they only charge $1.00 per disc repair, as long as you package them up in a cake box (the plastic cases that hold spindles of blank CDs or DVDs). They also sell disc polishing and repair machines, starting at about $700. Here's the URL:
Hope that helps.
-Chris
