To Wii or Not To Wii

For the longest time, I have been planning to write an article on how upset I am with Nintendo. They seem to be coming down with what can be called the Sony Syndrome; once they reach the top they start to get full of themselves and stop listening to the core crowd. Yes, I’ve been waiting to write an article that thrashes Nintendo for their ignorance to us, but then I realized something. If I was them, I’d be doing the same bloody thing.

Think about it for a moment. On one hand, you have millions upon millions of little kids, stay at home mums and old people all of whom are buying Wiis and Wii games like they’re heroin, when none of the games have much depth, only shiny neat features that most non-gamers wouldn’t expect from a game. Then you have the core crowd, or more aptly named, the “fans”. Fans gave rise to “fanboys”, and for a good reason. Fans are one of the most difficult things to please since they started making those talking baby dolls that refuse to shut up even upon decapitation. Fans demand the best, and whine profusely when they don’t get it. I would know, I’m guilty of it. Nintendo has put two and two together and come up with enough money to buy Belgium. Why suffer pleasing thousands of gremlins, when you can please millions of magpies willing to trade cold cash for anything shiny?

During the N64 and the Gamecube eras, Nintendo had always been the underdog, the "Little Console that Could". They kept this title by being forced to revolutionize the way we play games, by creating in-depth games so immersive that afterwards when you stub your toe you catch yourself looking for your health bar, and by pleasing the fans. Back then though, this was relatively easy to do, since we were used to 2D games and pixels being the size of our mothers face, but times do change and so do expectations. Since Nintendo has been the only company to ever take the term “nex-gen” literally, they took gaming to the next plausible level – which is the level short of sending us to the video game dimension where every man can destroy a planet by coughing and every girl has breasts the size of planets. Games have gotten about as deep as they’ll ever get, graphical technology has gotten to the point that if anyone still complains about it then they deserve to go blind, and we’ve created every possible genre of games conceivable. Where Sony and Microsoft improved menial things like graphics and some new software features – ie. being able to trash talk people over Halo while not being old enough to tie your shoes – Nintendo took a radical approach and decided to change the only thing that’s left to change and still crazy enough to make people tip their hats using only their eyebrows; The controller.

Now no more are we allowed to sit motionless, the only signs of life being the minute movements of our fingers as we press buttons and move joysticks a quarter of an inch. Oh, and they also called it the same thing I call the yellow stuff that fills my toilet after I finish a drinking match. But, all that aside, Nintendo still did their job; they created something radically new and rather awesome, and you cannot hate them for that. What you can hate them for is only releasing one good game with the Wii launch (and that game being a gamecube game as well), or hate them for not creating any games lately that would make someone between the ages of “first crush” and “married” willingly trade a days worth of food for.

But where I stand now, I choose to not hate them at all. I’ll just stand and hope that in the shiny streams of “wii” that the Wii is releasing, there will come a few gems worthy of spending money on that would otherwise go to an Xbox game.