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.

But don't despair!  There are options.  If this is something that happens regularly (with more than one disc), you could invest in a disc repair machine.  We reviewed VenMill's SkipAway Pro and Elite 60 and found them to be effective at repairing most light to medium scratches.  But the less expensive of these sells for $500.  Deeper gouges will require a professional disc repair machine, which can cost upwards of $3000.

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:

http://www.azuradisc.com

Hope that helps.

-Chris

What do you think?