One of our readers has contacted us about the trouble they encountered when playing Mario Kart Wii playing on their system. When they put in the disc it seems to work fine, with the system update happening without incident. However, after returning to the Disc Channel after its installation, and trying to start the game, an error message comes up telling users to eject the disc and turn off the system.

Turning the system off for a couple of hours, as was suggested to our reader by Nintendo Customer Service, did not help (and it's also super painful when you have a brand new game to play). In a subsequent call to Nintendo Customer Service, a representative their said that the system would have to be sent in to be examined. Given that this is pretty much a last resort for any gamer, he was a little averse to doing this. A third call to the hotline resulted in the suggestion to turn his vertically-oriented console horizontal, which, believe it or not, solved the issue. He's had no problems since.

While we're not ready to kick up a huge fuss about the issue, we would hesistate to completely disregard it. After it, it's coming relatively soon after some people in the US found that their copies of Super Smash Bros. Brawl (you may have heard of it) were not reading due to contamination of the disc drive's lens.

Are we beginning to see cracks emerging in what to date has been a pretty sturdy system? We'll keep you updated. In the meantime, it might be worth considering turning your console horizontally on occasion - it must take some special innards to read discs in both orientations, so giving it a bit of a break every once in a while couldn't hurt.

Quite frankly, the Wii would have to bottom-out completely before I would compare it to the issues with the PS3, let alone the 360.

It is troubling to hear that the newer games are having issues reading, but then again it may be caused by older lasers in the Wii? Would be interesting to see if the issue presents in a brand new console.

That being said, running a console in vertical position has long been known to cause read issues, so it's a good suggestion to keep it horizontal if possible, but if your like me and just *have* to have it vertical, maybe lie it down and leave it to idle when not in use?

The issue with SSBB was that they were using a higher capacity disc to fit everything in, so lasers with a bit of dust on them or whatever couldn't read it all properly.