Still playing Wii U CoD online? Nintendo has ruined your day, but you can get in nearly 9000 more matches

Nintendo has announced the exact date when it’ll shut down online services for both the 3DS and Wii U, but you’ll be glad to know there are a couple of months left for you to get your fill of playing some classic Call of Duty on the latter.

While we already knew thanks to an announcement made late last year that the online elements of the two consoles would be riding off into the sunset in early April 2024, it’s nice to finally have a concrete date on it. After all, how else is the one person that bought a brand new Wii U in 2023 going to cope with all of that uncertainty looming over their prized possession.

In case you’re wondering, April 8, 2024, has now officially been confirmed by Nintendo as the day when “online play and other functionality that uses online communication” for 3DS and Wii U will bite the dust. This means online co-op play, internet rankings, and data distribution will all also be saying goodbye on that day.

Despite this, some stuff like Pokemon Bank will still be usable after the rest goes, though it might also be deep sixed further down the line, and you’ve got until March 12 to shift your unused Nintendo eShop balance to your Nintendo Account, so you can access it on Switch. Nintendo added that “if an event occurs that would make it difficult to continue online services for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U software, we may have to discontinue services earlier than planned”.

But, assuming that doesn’t happen, and you’re one of the interesting people who’ve stuck around to play the likes of Call of Duty Black Ops 2 on the Wii U in recent years (yes, these people do exist, or did as of this time last year), how many team deathmatches can you get in between now and April 8?

Well, given that Black Ops 2’s deathmatches follow the traditional pattern of ending either once one team earns 75 kills or a ten minute time limit is reached, let’s work it out. If you clock off at 5 PM (that’s UK time) today, you’ll be about 74 days and six hours away from 11 PM (a sensible bedtime) on April 7. That’s about 106,920 minutes.

So, allowing for an extra two minutes for you to rapidly get into and out of each deathmatch - if you could find an endless string of them - you’d be able to get in 8910 of them if you played non-stop between those two points in time.

However, that number assumes that each match runs to the time limit, rather than ending early thanks to one of the teams hitting the aforementioned 75 kill mark. So, what I’m basically saying is that my bizarre maths (assuming it’s accurate and come on now, I used a calculator) actually makes for an arguably quite conservative estimate if you’re the owner of a very good K/D ratio and could make that endless string of matches happen somehow.

So yeah, nobody’s actually going to be able to execute what I’ve just outlined in practice for obvious reasons, but it’s technically plausible in theory, and that’s fun.

If you like vaguely old Nintendo stuff, some cult classic Game Boy Advance RPGs have recently arrived on Switch Online.