I don't care. Anytime is good.
And no, you just need to update for shop channel. Which I did. Safely through h4x. So now I have a 4.1U Wii with all the goodies of Homebrew. I just wanted the SD Menu really.
I could have illegally downloaded the games and installed VC games through homebrew, and kept my 3.2 version, but they're usually not the same quality as ones that you download officially. Plus that's called piracy, and is the reason Nintendo hates Homebrew.
I did test out a few games though. I just don't keep them. Like that, "My Life as a King" game. I put that on for a bit to see if it's worth buying. It is. I also tested Majora's Mask to see if it suffered from the lag in the Gamecube version. But it would never start. So I ignored that.
It's good for testing things. But I'm not gonna pirate anything. It's all of worse quality, makes Nintendo hate you, and you can't use any online stuff legitly. Also, people seem to mess with the games sometimes. For example, the "My Life as a King" game, for a split second, it says "xdeadpoolx is a ****tard." when you start it. Another reason to avoid that junk.