Skylanders Giants modding
I played a lot of skylanders as a kid and bough the ported version of Giants for my Wii U. The problems is that 100% completion is locked behind owning all the figures and some are just really difficult to come by and I really don’t want to spend the money. I think it would make a great video if you found a way to trick the game into thinking you have the usb portal plugged in and playing as any skylander. It’s definitely something I would love to have. It doesn’t look like anyone has made anything quite like this on the internet. The games aren’t incredibly but they’ve always been special to me. They have a pretty good sense of humor and I think the worst aspect is the figures.

Heh while the mechanics of this sound very much like a standard game cheat/mod, you could argue it's technically a crack/piracy since it's bypassing a paywall. I guess deep down they're the same thing, binary hacking to modify behavior, they just usually have different outcomes.

Anyways, while I do think this could be interesting, and probably should be done eventually for the sake of preservation, I also don't know if I'm the person to do it. I have no real attachment to this game and already very much have my hands full with 3-4 code projects and of course the YT channel. Never say never, but I wouldn't hold out for me to do it.

Maybe you should start building up your skills and work your way up to being able to do it yourself!

while I don't know about Wii U emulation on this front I do know that Dolphin recently has been adding features around these figure-based games and now supports both Skylanders and Disney Infinity portals through emulation, for now, this might be the only way to do this in such a manner. for other consoles... Maybe one of those writable NFC tags that started popping up around the peak of Amiibo popularity?

I’d imagine that emulation is probably the best way of getting it to work or finding someone else who has. I know that the Wii version is the original version of the game. The 360 and PS3 versions were done by another studio and have lots of bugs. The Wii U port of Giants was done by the original team along with the first game although it only released in Japan oddly enough. I still think it would be really cool to emulate the portal so it could work on an unmodified console, but I don’t know if that’s possible considering there is probably a form of piracy protection. The project seems a little out of my skill range but maybe someone has already documented how it work.