Nintendo Wii

Relying only on graphical prowess is not
going to work for you every single time,
and the video game industry is full
of stories showing us just that.

Sometimes, offering something wildly
different or adapting to the specific needs
or lifestyle of people over pure power
may be just what is needed.

But that takes something willing to
try, and most hardware makers are
pretty content with just ramping up
hardware specifications; after all,
it's the easiest way to do things.
And for a reason, mind you.

In the Seventh Generation, the one
willing to make such "unorthodox"
move was none other that Nintendo.

Many changes were taking place in the company,
and they had not much to lose after their GameCube,
as awesome it was, became the least commercially
successful console they made, at least by that time...

And it's safe to say as of today, that it paid off. Big time.
You could even say that it changed the world.

So let's talk about the Nintendo Wii!

The Nintendo Wii is, as I already mentioned, the successor of the previous Nintendo home system, the GameCube, and it was released in 2006.

Boy, where to begin with this system's story... There's so much to talk about!

Big changes were happening inside Nintendo. The biggest one, was that the person in charge of the company since they entered the video game industry, the president Hiroshi Yamauchi, stepped down in 2002, and let new blood get the reigns of the company. The most mind blowing thing is that, instead of just passing the company to a member of his family, which is very common practice in Japan, he opted to give it to someone else.

That person was Satoru Iwata. While I'd love to write in detail about this fascinating man (and I'd like to make a section about interesting people in this industry), this entry has already another goal, so I won't extend myself too much.

Yamauchi on the left, Iwata on the right.
This change would affect the company in a big, big way.

The choice made by Yamauchi was both pretty surprising, but also, at least in my opinion, incredibly well thought out. Mr. Iwata started out in HAL Laboratories, and made a name for itself by showing incredible capabilities for programming... And his boldness to go to Nintendo directly and ask them to work with them.

Nintendo started bit by bit to collaborate with HAL, sometimes reaching them to create games, sometimes for helping them with their own games, and Iwata more often than not was the one in charge to shape up things, to the point he became a dependable man for Nintendo.

That relationship grew stronger, and his work with Nintendo would become more and more important as time passed. Thing is, Iwata was not only a skilled as a programmer, he also was an actual fan of video games, and he was a very optimistic person about the future and technology. By the year 2000, he actually made it as part of the Planning Division of the company, and his input and assistance was noticed by the company, which is why he ended up being offered to be the president of Nintendo.

His story is truly one for the books, and he was a man worth looking up to, as he had so many different facets and little stories to hear about. Unfortunately, Satoru Iwata passed away in 2015 because of complications from bile duct growth. The news hit very hard on both the fans of the medium, and the industry itself because besides being a president, he became a face for the entire company through several means, like presenting the companies' announcement videos called Nintendo Directs, he even cut his salary in order to avoid his workers getting fired when things looked bleak during the mid 2010s.

It was so sweet how people from all places of life showed their affection towards Iwata in form of songs, drawings, written pieces, and more. I personally find remarkable that people had the need to show their affection towards the president of a company, something not very common at all, specially since higher ups from companies are often seen as greedy bastards for multitude of reasons.

For people to have such high opinion of you while in that sort of charge, you had to be special. But I'm getting sidetracked, let's go back to our subject.

As it's to be expected, work on this hardware started right after the Nintendo GameCube was released in 2001. After almost two decades of just following more powerful iterations of hardware, the company wanted to look at video games in a different light, trying to have something different. Beyond that, Iwata's ideal was to try and reach all kinds of people, from usual video game fans to non-gaming people, and lapsed fans that no longer played. Shigeru Miyamoto, one of the most well known creative minds inside Nintendo, and even in the entire industry, had this words in an interview:

"The consensus was that power isn't everything for a console. Too many powerful consoles can't coexist. It's like having only ferocious dinosaurs. They might fight and hasten their own extinction."

By 2004, things started to shape up for the new system, and rumours started appearing everywhere. The press liked to call the future Nintendo system as the "GCNext", or even the "N5", as the fifth home console the company would create. But a name coming from the company wouldn't take long to appear, as in the Pre-E3 event the company held the next year, they presented what it would be called, and that's none other than Nintendo Revolution.

It's amazing how little it changed from this prototype to the final model on the surface, but if you start looking,
you'll find quite a few things. For example, it seems that the sensor bar was part of the system!

Iwata presented the new system, and it was a crazy, crazy event. It probably took a good pair of balls (sorry, there's no better way to put it) to put yourself at the center of the stage and try to speak in a language you're not fluent with, to present a system that will try to jump aside from "the usual thing" with what will be the livelihood of your company and workers for years to come.

Maybe it's just me but I'd be a little bit nervous at the very least. The event was quite successful, as Iwata raised a small black device with is hand and told the audience about several features that were shown. I'll talk later about, but you can check it in this video below!

It still gives me goosebumps. The excitement felt by the audience when the Virtual Console was shown is great.

The most peculiar thing about this presentation, funny enough, it's not what it was shown, but rather what it was missing. They didn't show any sort of controller!

If you remember, the Nintendo 64 reveal was the same way, showing the system, but not how would you play the games. While we don't have any confirmation about why was like that with the Nintendo 64 reveal, we do know why it was missing from the announcement of the Nintendo Revolution.

And it was pretty simple. While by 2005 the controller of this new console was more or less ready, Miyamoto declared that certain issues needed to be troubleshooted before showing it, so they decided to show first the system and talk about some of its capabilities.

Thing is, Nintendo's engineers and designers really brainstormed the company's headquarters thinking about how the controller should be since 2001.

Four of the several crazy prototype controllers that the new console could have.
I kinda like the "GameCube Wavebird" thing.

These are a handful of prototypes, and - Yes, that Star thing was a controller. I know you won't stop looking at it so I'll get that thing out of the way first.

It was a very baffling thing, and we all wondered how it worked for years. Thankfully, a writer by the name of Osamu Inoue wrote a book in 2010 named "Nintendo Magic: Winning the Video Game Wars" and it was about Nintendo's two Seventh Gen. systems, their story, and how they managed to make the company achieve the amazing success they had. I don't know how "nice" would it be to copy part of the book related to this piece of Nintendo weirdness, so I'll summarize a bit.

The controller started with the idea of creating something similar to a TV Remote, but as they tested prototypes and changed stuff, the shape of several of them started to take weird forms.

Miyamoto in the book has an interview about this precise version of the controller. Laughing he said that no one liked it in the company, and they even called it the "Cheddar Cheese". The idea behind the controller was that the big star acted as a "main button", while having three other buttons, those little red things. The controller could be tilted in different ways to make use of accelerometers too.

During the development of the "Revolution" controller, pretty much everybody opposed to this design, arguing that it would make pretty much impossible to create more standard and "expected" experiences like for example what Mario or Zelda could offer. And they were completely right.

A much closer prototype to the final one, but with very interesting differences.

There's a lot to see with this console's prototype controllers, it's fascinating, but we should get going, after all, there's more than enough to talk about the final controller.

The Nintendo Revolution would captivate people's attention, and it was set to be launched in 2006, but before that happened, there was a change in name, and it's actually one of the biggest and most notorious name changes for a system. The Nintendo Revolution would be renamed as Nintendo Wii.

The name, as declared by the company, was changed for several reasons. The main one was to give more importance to the desire of making this console something that brought people together. After all, "Wii" is a misspelling of the word "We", and the logo uses the two lowercase "i" to symbolize two people together, something that would also be shown in commercials, with the two "i" vowing at the viewer, a very typical tradition in Japan.

Beyond that, the name Revolution wasn't seen as a successful one by the company. In their own words, they thought the name was not suited for a global name, specially since it was rather long, and hard to pronounce in a number of languages. This change would create opinions of all types. Many people found the name funny and silly, many others liked it and thought it had charm, while some others really didn't mind one way or another. Even developers made comments about this.

But you have to admit, it worked, and the name Wii is still even remembered today.

In any case, the system released in November 2006 in North America, and December in the other big three markets, Europe, Australia and Japan. In a funny trivia, here in Spain the Wii's launch had to be move one day further because the original date, 8th Decemeber, is a festivity here and shops close. What timing!

And what a launch! While nothing could touch PS2 insane numbers, the Wii was selling incredibly well. It quickly became the fastest and best selling Nintendo console up to that point, with the system selling 600.000 units in 8 days in North America, selling the entire 400.000 shipment in Japan in 3 days, and even becoming the fastest selling console in Europe (yes, even counting the United Kingdom, it got beat the Xbox 360 too) and even in Australia.

In fact, the console and its initial accessories, like extra controllers, were in such demand that it was hard to deal with shipments, and there were several delays and problems early on. And like with the PS2, you also had scumbags doing that lovely thing called price gouging.

Jesus, what a weird sensation is to see decades of gaming in such tiny, awesome tower.
The fact that each new system is smaller than the previous one is also impressive to me!

By 2007, the Nintendo Wii, which was the last one to be released in that generation after the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3, became the market leader in worldwide hardware sales, and would never leave the first spot. The system would end up selling more than 101 million units, breaking any previous record from previous Nintendo Systems, and of course, being the best selling home system of the Seventh Generation, and fortunately, the other two systems weren't left too behind, as the other sold at leas 80 million units each, which was great.

The Wii (and the companion handheld too, the Nintendo DS) were big, big times for Nintendo, specially after the GameCube failed to achieve big sales; although I'd argue that it wasn't its fault, every home console not named PlayStation 2 got pretty disappointing results as far as commercial success goes because of the aforementioned. Also, unlike de PS3 and the Xbox 360, Wii was never sold at a loss, so each unit brought them benefits, making the hardware sales a really profitable business.

The system would have also a pretty long life, with it releasing in 2006, and stopping production completely in 2017! Not quite as long as the PS2 but it's darn impressive.

But let's continue with the other stuff, like for example... What happened with the controller?

Man, I remember how comfortable felt to be able to play
with your arms away from each other. 

Here it is! It's officially named the Nintendo Wii Remote, but people just call it Wiimote (yeah, get used to the "Wii" puns!). It's a very versatile and interesting controller, one of the most unique and fascinating controllers to check out. It's wireless, it pairs with the console through Blue-Tooth and makes use of two AA batteries, which, depending on what you're playing and doing with it can last a quite variable amount of time (the batteries' capacity also mattered).

The main way of holding it is just like any TV or DVD remote controller, and in the front there is a Power Button to turn the system, but more importantly, an Infrared Transmitter just like a normal remote. It was used for aiming controls, alongside a Sensor Bar that plugged into the system and is positioned either over or under the TV.

Aiming controls were one of the best assets of this controller, in my personal opinion, and I'll make myself clear about it later. Having this set up for aiming also meant that it could be used with any display, unlike earlier attempts of aiming-related controllers that only worked with CRTs. The response time is quick and pretty great, although precision is dependent on your TV, displays with a higher refresh rate are much better for aiming accuracy (although to be fair, higher refresh rates are better for anything related to video games!).

With the Wiimote hold vertically, you had access to the A and B Buttons, with the second one hidden on the lower side of the controller shaped like a Trigger. This let the possibility for pushing both buttons quickly, holding one and still be able to press the other comfortably, and also giving the possibility of pushing both at the same time, which many games used as a sort of "pincer" control to grab things and move them around.

Start and Select Buttons would be replaced with the + and - Buttons. The new Home Button was used to bring you back to the main system's hub, pause the game you were playing (pretty useful stuff!) and also bring other options like adding controllers for multiplayer games.

Some games are even played by changing between vertical
and horizontal modes.

It also had a D-Pad on the upper side, with a large variety of uses depending on the game, or even context within each game. On the other side, two new Buttons named 1 and 2 were also introduced (in previous prototypes they were X and Y).

There are also four little blue lights in the lower side, which were there indicate several things, like showing how much battery still has, or which player number you are. The Wiimote even has Rumble support and a Speaker (and a Microphone!) which could be used in several ways, one of the earliest ones were to give a very curious effect to the Arrows you shoot in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Thankfully, both functions could be turned off too. The controller itself would also turn off by itself it went unused for 5 minutes, which helped saving batteries.

Finally, this controller, as it is, without no extra attachments, could be used vertically or horizontally, by just rotating it, becoming very similar to the original NES controller, and this mode was used heavily by 2D games.

This thing even had a small memory chip and it was capable of storing information!

Now, all that is great! This thing is really well put together and has many features for such a tiny thing, personally speaking, I think it's really well built. But the big thing of the Wiimote, the element that made everyone remember it, is the Motion Control capabilities through the use of accelerometers.

Thanks to said accelerometers, the Wiimote was capable of registering the direction and speed at which the controller was moved and transform said movements into actual data. It could move left and right, up and down, and even forward and backwards, so to put it in a simpler way, it could register movement in the X, Y & Z Axes. Not only that, it can also register rotations, which are usually named Bank (lateral rotation) and Pitch (vertical rotation). There's a very old video that it's really good at showing all this made by a Youtube user named Chad Tower.

These motion sensing capabilities is what launched the system into fame. It also helped that the console came packed with a game named Wiisports (although it wasn't a pack-in in Japan).

And that's just the Wiimote itself. The console was made to shake up the way we play, and to offer different experiences, and also meant giving you a whole bunch of different ways to control games. And Nintendo Wii was compatible with a large amount of different ways to play games.

And I forgot about other stuff, like the Wiifit Balance Board!
I really find great how varied could your time spent on this system be.

On the lower side of the Wiimote there was an Expansion Port, in which you could connect several things, the main one being the Nunchuk. Very aptly named, this thing added an Analog Stick and two Buttons more, Z and C to the mix, and it also had its own motion capabilities.

Wiimote and Nunchuk were the usual way to play most of the games that fell into the more "standard styles of games", such as the aforementioned Twilight Princess. That said, many experimental games also did use the Nunchuk in combination with the Wiimote for unique control schemes, and I remember at least one game that can be fully played with just the Nunchuk.

While the Wiimote, or Wiimote and Nunchuk combo were the default controller options, there were a slew of other possibilities, like the Classic Controller and the Classic Controller Pro. Originally created with the intention to play retro games (and that matter will come later), actual Wii games started to support it with as time went on.

These controllers are for the most part a revival of the Super Nintendo controller (they were designed for it after all), with added Analog Sticks, and another pair of Triggers , ZR and ZL. Both the Normal and Pro versions are great, and each has its perks.

The Normal Classic Controller is the one that resembles the SNES pad the most. It's a bit more weighty than the Pro, and L and R are pressure sensitive, like the GameCube's triggers. On the other hand, the Pro model has handles for more comfortable grip. Besides that, ZR and ZL have changed places and sizes. In the Normal model, they're small and stand between L and R, in the Pro model, they're similar to a PlayStation controller.

I really like both, they've been super useful and comfortable to use throughout the years.

And yes, that there is a GameCube controller!

While the Wii was exciting news by itself, the fact hat it was
backwards compatible gave it a big boon to me.

As the video I put before revealed, if you saw it of course, The Nintendo Wii is backwards compatible with GameCube games, controllers, Memory Cards, and some accessories.

Wii actually has GameCube hardware inside it, so there's no emulation at all, games run natively, meaning no issues o weird inconsistencies or incompatibilities. Even the Game Boy Player disc works, although because the peripheral itself can't be connected, it can't be used.

This gives you access to hundreds of great games on top of the Wii's library. Just like the PS1 backwards compatibility in PS2, this really is a very welcomed feature. But it goes a bit further here as the GameCube controller was also supported by quite a few Wii games. While not as extensive as the Classic Controller (after all, not everybody that would get a Wii would have a GameCube), it's very handy whenever is compatible.

The last thing I'll talk control-wise is the Wii Motion Plus. Originally conceived as an add-on for the Wiimote (pictured in the lower right part of the picture above) and released in 2008, the Motion Plus was a way to improve the capabilities of the Wiimote as far as motion recognition goes. It was created because developers demanded better motion capabilities, but wasn't possible at an affordable price until then.

This peripheral hides inside Gyroscopes that let the controller register more complex and specific movements. Only games developed with it in mind could take advantage of it, and even then, only a handful of them truly needed the peripheral, but for the games that it worked with it usually meant a pretty noticeable improvement.

But there's really no reason to seek a Motion Plus add-on, because Nintendo also produced Wiimotes with Motion Plus built into it, which is way more convenient and practical. It's pretty easy to spot which ones have this peripheral included, it says "Wii Motion Plus INSIDE" in the lower part of the Wiimote!

But let's end with all this controller ramble. Let's talk about the Wii itself, as, unlike most previous systems, has more than a simple menu or literally nothing (like 8 and 16 Bit systems).

You have to admit, for how simple the Wii menu is, it has it's unique charm too.

The "operative system" of the Wii revolves around the idea of being easy to use and understand and quick to access, which is to be expected of a system aimed to any type of person. It looks minimalistic and to the point, with colors that mimic the console itself, white as the console (at least, the original colour it was released with), gray as its stand, and blue as the LED lights that shine out of the disc drive. And the best part of all, not a single advertisement in sight!

The main hub is separated in two parts, the bigger one is where all the software applications and games are layered out. Represented as TV screens, any of these interactive pieces of software like a game or other utility are called Channels, and there are 4 screens worth of space for these Channels with each one displaying 12 Channels each, so you could have up to 48 Channels at once in your Wii's main menu.

Accessing each Channel was as easy as pointing at it with the Wiimote and push the A Button. Something really cute about the Wii is that each individual application had its own little animations, one being a sort of "idle" animation while you're on the main hub, and another one as a sort of introduction when you select a channel. And not only these Channels had these animations, every retail Wii game had them too. Sometimes they were pretty simple, other times were cooler.

One of the little things I really liked about the Wii is to find out what animation the last game I bought had!

I always liked the Twilight Princess, both Pikmin and both Kororinpa games' intros. 

Besides games, the Wii had a a whole bunch of other applications, such a News and Forecast Channels, the Photo Channel, a Web Browser and even stuff like Netflix were accessible, which was pretty cool coming from the Sixth Generation.

On the lower part of the screen you had access to other menus, like the Options menu, that gave you access to a bunch of settings as you may expect and also let you manage the Save Data of both Wii and GameCube games if you had a GC Memory Card inserted into the console. Later on the Wii's life a new menu was added, and that's the SD menu. You could store Channels on a SD card in order to have more than the 48 main Channels.

Lastly, on the lower right part of the screen you had the Wii Message Board, which let you send messages to your friends (by exchanging Friend Codes), share pictures and other things. You would also receive bulletins with information, you would get a resume of your playtime with the console, pointing to you the time spent in each game you played, which is a feature that would be passed to later Nintendo systems!

Some games would even update your Message Board, either to congratulate you for doing something, like Wiisports, some games would even use it for some weird ways of communicating with you!

The Wii also had one quite interesting feature, the addition of Miis.

Here's where you spent hours of your life trying to make characters you liked!
There were (and still are) websites dedicated to share these creations! And what a catchy theme!

Miis are simplistic and customizable Avatars that could be used in many ways with the Wii. By combining different types of eyes, mouths, eyebrows, hair styles, weight, size and such you created characters that could resemble whatever you wanted. The idea behind this is having a little character that looked like you to use throughout the different features of the console, and having each person that used the same system have their own.

Funny enough, this is the realization of something that Nintendo has always wanted to put in a game or system, and it's something that tried to make work since the Famicom days! In fact you're an avid fan of old stuff, you may even remember certain N64 and GC software that could scan your face, or use a photo to create a character and have it in a simulation game.

It's fun that after many years they managed to make the idea work!

Miis could be shared with friends through the Message Board, and you could even store Miis in your Wiimote and take them to another person's console. They were used in many varied ways, most interesting ones being as playable characters in a variety of games.

These little things also had their own Channel named "Check Mii Out", in which you could upload your creations, and could be shared and rated by others. The ratings system wasn't just "good or not", but there were different categories or specifications and people would try to put the best Mii they thought would fit with it. It was pretty fun for what it was.

The concept of Miis was so popular that would end up appearing in Microsoft's Xbox 360 after an update that to the entire user interface in 2008, they were simply named "Avatars" and were created by Rare. While the company said they worked for years on them before the Miis were shown, there was still a lot of debate about it. Personally, I only wonder why Avatars ended looking how they did, as there was a lot of concept art and most of it looked more interesting than the final product, in my humble opinion of course.

But going back to the Wii. Overall the system had its own quirky charm, between the presentation of the menus, the Miis, and of course the several pieces of music that would play in the different sections of the menu and Channels. The Mii Channel, for example, has one very catchy, very memorable simplistic tune, and the Photo Channel has a whole little collection of tunes (you could even create puzzles out of photos and have a little game to play with its own music!). Heck, the News and Forecast channels also had music, and would change depending the hour of the day!

It's... It's so Nintendo it hurts, and I say it in the most endearing way possible.
Please take a look at the Wii's system soundtrack, it has some melodies that just make you smile. Besides the two Channels with great music we all know, the Photo Channel truly has some amazing music for what it is, with themes like Puzzle Menu, Puzzle Theme, Doodle, all the Slideshow themes are likable... It's just great!

There's one more thing I'd like to talk in relation to the system's overall features, but it's better to leave it for later. Let's change subject for now.

So, as I said, the Wii was a monster in sales, in popularity, and attracted a lot of people that never cared about video games. It was a big step up from the previous generation.

And what happens when something gets really popular? 

Yup! Other people try to replicate its success!

It's kinda obvious by now, but neither of the "copies" did have much of
a success story, nor the same appreciation as Nintendo's system. 

With the roaring popularity of the system, both Sony and Microsoft would try to jump into the bandwagon and created their own motion controlled peripherals.

These were the PlayStation Move and the Xbox Kinect.

The Move was... A pretty close approximation of the Wiimote, to say it plain and simple. Sony started to work on this peripheral in 2008, after the Nintendo Wii showed to be a selling beast, and it was released in 2010. One of the few positive things to come from this controller is that started the approach of reuniting the different hardware development teams of the different regions to work together to create the Move, and later the PS Vita and the PS4.

Originally, the idea of Sony was to use the Move in combination with the PS3's standard controller, the DualShock 3, but it was seen as cumbersome and not very useful, so the Move ended having its own "Nunchuk" too.

While in its release it got good reviews by "professional" media, public reaction wasn't as positive generally speaking. Sony wasn't all that impressed or pleased by its commercial results, or the support it received either, as Fergal Gara of Sony UK declared in 2012. Thing is, supposedly it sold at least 15 million units, so to me it doesn't sound too bad. To be fair to the PS Move, Sony didn't put all the effort they could or should to make it more successful, which is something Sony does quite often, like it happened with the PSP or the PS Vita...

On the other side, Microsoft had its Xbox Kinect. Releasing in 2010, it was a device that, rather you control it, like the Wiimote, was stationary and acted as a motion sensing device. In many ways it reminds me of the PlayStation 2's Eyetoy... Which in turn reminds me of the Dreamcast's camera, named Dreameye.Video game history is funny like that. Even funnier, the first reports of Microsoft going into the Wii craze talked about them also making a Wiimote clone codenamed "Newton".

Without any sort of input from the player, the only way to interact with it was through gestures and movements from your own body. This sounded pretty cool initially, but it had quite a few issues. The Kinect had an inherent delay, which proved to be a problem for many users, and that paired with the fact you needed a pretty big open space to even start to work with it, and more to use it comfortably, it wasn't all that amazing of an experience. Navigating through menus was usually one of the most annoying things, for example.

Early on it became quite popular, and in fact Microsoft tried to push it hard in marketing, even going so far as giving it the main spotlight for several annual E3 conventions... Which didn't make some people happy, although it gave us countless hilarious moments. In fact, all three companies would give us a lot of unintended comedy during those years.

Unlike the PS Move, the Kinect had more of a success, as the peripheral was expanded to PC and later to Xbox One... But it ended being discontinued after the not so great launch of the Xbox One. But that's the story for another day... And what a story.

I don't know what is harder to believe, that the guy doesn't crack up, 

or that I remembered this video of 2010.

What it matters I guess, is that both tried to get into the trend the Wii became... And both failed to get half as much traction, and the reason was mainly one. To quote Reggie Fils-Aimé, who's retiring this very April and leaving Nintendo after more than 15 years, "The games. It's always the games".

Hurts me to say, but it's kinda the truth. When you look at the general opinion of the libraries for both peripherals, the only real constant is the the negative reaction to most of the games released for them. A good chunk of them had dubious quality, controlled in very unreliable ways, or played themselves, even.

While the "failure" of these two motion control devices relates to more than one cause, I feel the biggest one is that the software failed to appeal the intended market. Which is exactly where the Wii and Nintendo excelled. Think whatever you want about these types of games, but the guys at Nintendo were capable of making games like WiiSports appealing, simple and approachable yet entertaining and easy to share with other people.

The other big factor, I would argue is that, well, PS Move and Kinect were afterthougths, things created years later after the consoles' release trying to get a piece of a cake that suddenly appeared. On the other hand, the Wiimote, the motion controls, the entire concept was the Wii's flesh and bones. Games weren't created "for the peripheral", they were created for the system itself. Heck, the system sidestepped from the usual "graphical power race" into a completely untested territory searching for that precise goal.

By 2010, the PS3 and Xbox 360 had their own playground already, and it was a very different one from the Wii's, so trying to force it to change was never going to work in the way the companies wished, and in Sony's case, without offering enough first party support of exclusive games.

But I guess I should move on, we should get back onto the Wii. And what's the most important, the games themselves... and finish this horribly long entry!

Everybody and their mother jumped into this "business".
Ubisoft was in fact one of the most infamous ones, as they were a renown company.

When everything is said and done, talking about the Wii library is a bit tricky.

The Wii became such a hit thanks in good part by reaching people that never cared about video games, by offering them experiences far away from the usual stuff. In typical "gamer" fashion, the community tried to differentiate between what they thought were such games and the more "standardized" experiences that they believed to be in line with their typical tastes, by categorizing games as "Casual" or "Hardcore". They became quite the overused and even satirical terms, thankfully, their used has gone down over time.

It doesn't help the fact that when the floodgates were opened, many a company tried to throw to the wall anything they could to see what would stick in an attempt to make a quick buck out of this new market of non-experienced people that didn't know how to approach purchases beyond what they saw on the cover. So when the system (or the peripherals created by the other companies) is mentioned, very often you would see automatic dismissal from some people because of the superficial opinion they have about it.

And yeah, I understand why people would like to differentiate from that sort of stuff from games made with other intentions. I've always thought that as far as video game tastes, different folks, different strokes. Different people like different types of games, and dislike different types of games, but even when you can put two people together that like the same stuff, chances are they enjoy them for very different reasons for doing so, and can be the complete opposite, yet they still like the same thing!

That's how people work and it's completely fine, as long as there is some self-awareness to your words and opinions. Yet I also believe there's a bit of a difference between not caring about something and completely wave away an entire system's library for ill conceived reasons.

Just like the PlayStation 2, the Wii has a big load of Shovelware. In fact, many Shovelware came directly from the PS2, which is quite telling, at least to me. Not only your usual suspects started to release low quality products, companies of relevance such as Ubisoft, THQ, Activision and others were equally as guilty of this now. And it's amazing what they tried to get away with. Simply embarrassing and shameful.

But... To think that this is all you'll find? To really believe there's absolutely nothing worth to play?
Throughout the years I've talked with more people than I care to count that really thought this way.

And I always asked to myself the same thing: Did they even took a look at the library of the system? Because even if you made a half-assed attempt to do so, you'd simply wouldn't be able to say that with a straight face.

Why I'm writing so much when I could be playing any of these?!

The truth is that, once you are able to move aside the Shovelware, you can find a huge number of great games of very varied styles and genres to play, and it's wildly different to what you would usually find on the libraries of the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360. In fact I've always considered the good library of Wii to be way more in tune with the Sixth Generation, and more specifically, as a sort of bridge between the GameCube's and PlayStation 2's libraries.

It just feels so much closer to that era of gaming, and I say this as a positive thing. With the pass to the Seventh Generation, gaming, at least in my eyes of course, would become quite dull and "by the numbers", as the huge rise of development costs thanks to the High Definition resolutions did big damage to Japan as a game developing region. More than a hundred studios and companies closed during those years because of this big change, and the Western companies would rise and become the leading ones, and genres like the First Person Shooter would reign supreme... And bloated.

Wii was pretty much a completely different ground with all the mentioned cons, and pros. One positive, talking about retail games, is that Nintendo left behind the cute Mini-DVDs of the GameCube and now used optical discs with the same storage capacity as a normal DVD, which is more than triple the space, and with DVD readers becoming much more reliable and faster, it was the right time.

Obviously, the most important part of any library from a Nintendo system is the games created by the very company, and the Wii had overall a fantastic support from Nintendo all things considered, and it was really varied too.

Of course, we got big stuff, such as Super Mario Galaxy and the first direct sequel to a 3D Mario ever, Smash Bros. Brawl was a gigantic freaking package of content with surprises such as Snake from Metal Gear Solid and Sonic The Hedgehog, two Legend of Zelda titles, Metroid Prime 3, Mario Kart Wii, a remake of GoldenEye, Xenoblade Chronicles and such...

But, Nintendo also brought back and released so many smaller yet great games too!

 

Man, I do love these commercials! There were more with a documentary feel, about other boxers like King Hippo!

Doc Louis needs his own game, too.

I mean, Punch-Out!! and Donkey Kong Country came back since the SNES days! The Excite series and Sin & Punishment also came back, the first with two new entries even, after radio silence for years since the N64! Kirby was back on consoles after its absence on GameCube, and with two amazing games!

And that's not all! We got the first Wario Land and Wario Ware made specifically for a home console, the first 2D Mario in a home system since the Super Nintendo days with cooperative multiplayer, the Rhythm Heaven series was at last released outside Japan and the Wii got a phenomenal entry, out of the blue we got a remake of Fatal Frame 2 (and they also made a fourth entry, even if it never released outside Japan), direct sequels to Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance and Battalion Wars, a new take on Paper Mario (which admittedly is not what I expected, but it was still pretty fun, and it's the last solidly good Paper Mario game yet), etc.

Between revivals and such, it was pretty exciting to me.

They also released several new franchises for this generation. Such as Endless Ocean, Disaster: Day of Crisis, Trauma Center and Another Code (and of course, the already mentioned Xenoblade), and new entries in some games created for the GameCube, like the Mario Baseball & Soccer games. Heck, they even ported some GameCube games to the Wii to make use of the motion controls, such as the Pikmin games or Donkey Kong Jungle Beat (which is very, very different in many ways to the GC version, and I don't say it in a bad way!).

Of course, you also had the "Wii -" line of games, with WiiSports and its sequel, WiiSports Resort,  Wii Party, Wii Play and Wii Play: Motion, Wii Fit and Wii Fit Plus heck, they even released Wii Chess! Maybe I find the first Wii Play a bit weak, but besides that these titles are decent to great, and they pulled out what they intended to do. Even some oddball stuff, like Link's Crossbow Training, an Arcade-style shooter, is worth to check out.

As you'd expect, not every game they released was great... Wii Music is still a bit of a joke (woah, that E3...), the Mario Party games on Wii are generally seen as weak (in fact I'd say Wii Party is quite a bit better), Metroid: Other M hurt the saga in such a way that it still provokes heated reactions, and no one is running back to play Donkey Kong: Barrel Blast, but to be perfectly honest, when you put everything together, I feel that Wii really got a great deal of good stuff from Nintendo, probably a lot more than on the home systems of the previous two generations.

And that's just one company.

Every time I make one of these collages I end up wanting to replay most of
the games I mention. It's a curse, I tell you.

Again, Wii is not Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3. You won't find Mass Effect, nor you'll find Dragon's Dogma, although you'll find Call of Duty. Third Party support is wildly variable and while you won't find "Triple A games for Big Boys", there's lots of variety.

The Wii saw a bit of a rebirth of some genres, like 2D Platformers. Besides Nintendo's own games which are already a good handful, stuff like A Boy and His Blob had a remake, Klonoa had a remake, Rayman went back to 2D again with Origins, games like A Shadow's Tale and Ivy the Kiwi were released too, with interesting mechanics and ideas.

Certain genres really benefited from the Motion and Aiming controls the Wii offers! Several sport games became much more fun, like Golf games, such as We Love Golf or the Tiger Woods games (which are legit decent if you care about the sport, albeit I like my games more colorful), and WiiSports Resort is really well made. Fishing games also became much more fun than with typical controllers,  like Sega Bass Fishing, which is pure Arcade fishing with great music, Rapala We Fish, which is a very silly but fun game about making "fishing combos" by using fish you reel to get bigger fishes, and then you have stuff like Fishing Resort, which is amazing and has great fishing, exploration, aquarium management, upgrades, vehicles and more. It may look like Shovelware on the outside, but believe me, it's really great!

And talking about genres coming back, Arcade Shooters revived for a while thanks to the Wiimote, and the Wii has a sizable amount of Arcade Shooters, some original, like Dead Space: Extraction, or House of the Dead: Overkill, trying to feel like an exploitation movie and succeeding with flying colors, even two Resident Evil themed games in which you quickly played through the classic games' stories and some new events too; or with great Arcade ports such as House of the Dead 2  & 3 Compilation, and the hilarious Target Terror and Ghost Squad, two great games with a very great cheesy soul, I got quite addicted to the second one... I mean, there's a Police Ninja mode!

Motion controls also gave us quite a few skill-based games, such as the two Kororinpa games, the two Boom Blox, Mercury Meltdown Revolution, Dewy's Adventure, Zack & Wiki (incredibly charming, that one!), Vertigo and even Sega tried something unique with Let's Tap.

And then you have games that look like Shovelware on the outside, but they're legitimately well intended games and often enough decent and fun. Titles such as the already mentioned Fishing Resort and Endless Ocean, Go Vacation, We Ski & Snowboard, Order Up! and quite a few others.

Of course, there's still much more than that, from more standard stuff to oddball titles, but I could talk for hours about it and I should really finish this already. Still, I have one last thing to bring up.

Discs weren't the only way to get games for this system, and that's because the Wii was also the first system for Nintendo to actually have a digital store, named Wii Shop Channel.

Oh boy, so simple, so quick to access... So little ads.
And what catchy music!

The Wii Shop had a quite direct and to the point interface, and you were able to buy and download games created specifically for the console and stored in its memory of 512MB (kinda small, to be frank) or an SD card. Software created and released for this was called Wiiware games. You first would need to purchase Wii Points (here in Spain, each 100 Points were 1 Euro) and the price of the games varied depending on the overall content of the game, but usually was around the 5 to 10 Euros or Dollars, which I thought was fair.

Wiiware was the way Nintendo wanted to approach small developers or groups with small budgets, so they could create smaller experiences without the worry or risk of retail production, and really, many games were created for this service, and not only smaller developers created games here.

And I don't lie, over 450 different titles were created over time for the Wii Shop. That's way more than I expected back when the Wii Shop was announced! And as you may expect, there's lots of variety, and many worthwhile games even for today. Quite a few got demos to try on, which was really helpful to see what you'd like (this way I found out how Rage of the Gladiator was really fun!).

You had big name stuff like Doctor Mario Online Rx, Pokémon Rumble, and a very cute Excitebike game coming from Nintendo, the amazing Mega Man 9 and 10 coming from Capcom (my most watched trailer for a game has to be MM9, what a surprise back then!), Square Enix released several games, the most famous being My Life As a King, and Konami also put many cool games, specially the "Rebirth" series, updated entries for Castlevania, Gradius and Contra old school classics.

It also had loads of indie and obscure games. Motoheroz, Snowpack Park, And Yet It Moves, World of Goo, Cave Story, Art of Balance, the Art Style games, Fluidity and Toki Tori to name a small few.

Like with most systems I care about, I've made a list of cool Wiiware games so I don't forget any interesting title, and it's both surprising and a bit sad that many more than I thought were only available on the Wii, such as Liight, Shadow Play, Space Invaders Get Even, Blaster Master Overdrive, Tomena Sanner and more.

As a note, these games had a size limit of around 40 to 50 Megabytes, and seeing how nicely put together some of these Wiiware games were, I have nothing but respect to the developers, because wow, I still can't believe they are so tiny!

But this Wii Shop wasn't only there for Wiiware. While the console would be revolutionary for its Motion Controls and its attempt to get people not interested in gaming to play; Nintendo also was trying something really important for "core" fans of the medium, and I still find like a dream that would never happen. I'm talking about the Virtual Console.

This would later be expanded with more systems to choose from, really creating an amazing service.

When the console was revealed under the name Revolution, Iwata was pretty happy to announce that the system would be able to play more than twenty years of Nintendo games across past systems. The idea of being able to play NES, SNES, and N64 games all in one machine without the need of cartridges was nothing short of amazing.

The surprise would even get better when, later, the company also announced that Sega Mega Drive (or Sega Genesis) and TurboGrafx-16 (or PC-Engine) games would also be part of this service; and even more would come with time!

The list of systems that were supported on the Virtual Console is this:

• Nintendo Entertainment System 
• Super Nintendo
• Nintendo 64
• Sega Master System
• Sega Mega Drive
• TurboGrafx-16 (And some CD-based games!)
• Neo Geo AES
• MSX

Nintendo really did put a good effort in trying to get as many good classic games as possible, and in fact there were more than 400 different titles across all systems.

This, for people like me, that never stopped liking old games, was a gigantic selling point. Not only I had access to a big number of classics, but I also discovered quite a few gems from the past thanks to this shop; and it really brought back interest in retro gaming to a more surface level. The Virtual Console even gave us games that never left Japan, such as Sin & Punishment and Castlevania: Rondo of Blood, or games that never reached Europe, such as Super Mario RPG, Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger. It was delightful.

Sadly the Wii Shop closed earlier this year. There are still ways to play these games, I suppose, but to me it's truly sad to see it go. As simple as it was, the Wii Shop was a memorable part of the console, and I mean it beyond the absolute classic theme that played while on the digital store.

Also, the Wii Shop has one of the best animations for downloading games ever:

I'll never get tired of this!

Whenever you downloaded something, it was represented with Mario or Luigi running around, collecting coins, either being Mini, normal, or with the Fire Flower Power Up, as they hit the classic blocks, and once you had the game downloaded, they would keep hitting the last block, with it dropping multiple coins like in the games.

It had several animations, the most rare one was with the brothers swimming across the screen. It really is charming, and one reason more of why I think this console has so much charm.

But going back to the Shop and the Wii...  Seriously, think about it:

Being able to play stuff like Paper Mario, Ocarina of Time, Sonic The Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles, Shining Force 2, Chrono Trigger and Castlevania: Rondo of Blood in the same system without any complication, plus all the retail Wii games, plus Wiiware, and GameCube games through retrocompatibility...

...This machine, as humble as it was in comparison with the other consoles of its generation, was nothing short of fantastic if you cared about games in general.

This little thing gave you access to decades of gaming, across different systems from different companies; it offered new ways to play combined with the old school stuff. Nothing is perfect, of course, yet it has so much to offer that I still find it worth celebrating.

Which by the way I feel the need to mention, the Wii is probably one of the best built consoles around. It's very compact and very well organized inside; if you ever open one up you'll find how well put together it is. It was a system with a very low failure rate, specially in a generation where the famous "Red Ring of Death" from the Xbox 360 and the "Yellow Light of Death" from PlayStation 3 were pretty big topics.

I get the difference in power, but you can't tell me with a
straight face it wasn't just better built all around.

It's small, mine never got too heated, it was quieter than the other consoles... It feels solid, really solid. The only real problem the hardware faced was that the disc drive of early units wasn't really prepared to be used with double-layered DVDs, so they would wear down quickly. After reports about it Nintendo would change the drives for better ones (in fact the disc drive would constantly change as production continued throughout the years), and I've read they would repair your system for free if it suffered that fate.

Now, if you ever desire to get a Wii, let me give you a good advice: Look for a Black, Light Blue or Red console, the last one being an Anniversary Edition that came with New Super Mario Bros. Wii and Donkey Kong Original Edition, and it's the one I have.

Why, do you ask? Well, they are later models that had some good improvement over the first units produced. They still have GameCube support, but they also consume less electricity and heat less too, they even have a bit better picture quality output.

When buying a system, it's always better if you're able to check it out, but a quick way to see if a Wii console has GameCube support without touching it, is if the "Wii" logo on it is put in a way so you can read it while the console is in a vertical position, like in this image.

You should avoid the Wii Mini revision. It's a pretty disappointing offer, losing many features such as GameCube compatibility, SD card and USB ports, internet capabilities and even 480P support. It a disgusting version overall.


In fact, since I bought mine back in 2010, I've never unplugged it unless it was to move it to another part of my home to keep using it. It has been part of my main gaming setup since then, and it's been used consistently the entire time. This thing has seen three different Xbox 360 die, get repaired and die again (what a terrible quality build). It has seen a PS3 and a couple of TVs come and go too, yet it's still here, always working fine, and it's close to reach a decade of continuous use.

I never thought I'd say that from one single device much less about this specific console with the reputation it has in some places. This thing has become one of my favourite consoles simply because of how much it lets me do and play. And that's not even taking into account the modding and homebrew scene, because that community is big and still alive, they even revived several online features of the console, like online play for a lot of games, and Wiiconnect 24!

Looking back, the Wii sort of marks the end of an era for me. It's like the last bastion of gaming before we fully entered the "HD era", and everything changed, from development priorities and creative mindsets, to consumer tastes and everything in between. But at the same time it tried something different and attempted to bring people of all kinds to play together.

...In a way, it's a very Iwata console. And while not perfect, that's more than cool enough for me. There's so many games to talk about with this that I don't know where I'll begin, but we'll see how it goes!

Now if you excuse me I have the urge to play some Geometry Wars: Galaxies. Or some Kororinpa. Or maybe a bit of Fishing Resort, I just unlocked a boat to sail around the open sea and I really want to explore, which makes me remind I want to re-play Endless Ocean: Blue World.

24 Hours a day are not enough. Anyway... Toodles!