Ranting about Nintendo in 2022

I’ve been thinking about Nintendo consoles a bit as I continue playing my Wii U over pretty much everything else.
Nintendo makes a lot of really bad decisions with their consoles.
Don’t get me wrong, they pretty much saved the video game industry with the NES, and the SNES was a fantastic follow-up with many games worthy of all time greats status. Where they really start making truly bad decisions was with the N64.

The N64 in hindsight is a really weird system. Even more than just the controller I mean. They used expensive to produce Cartridges limited to 64MB when everything else was going to cheap 700mb CDs. And the system was built with the intention of eventually needing expansion memory, but was only ever needed in 2.5 games. The expansion pack was just bundled with DK64 by default which just leaves me wondering why they would build a console with the intention of eventually needing it?
The N64’s revolutionary thing was supporting 4 players out of the box, while all of the other systems were still only 2. This is probably why party games were such a focus for the N64.
N64 has some of the all time great games from Nintendo, but every part of the system suffered from delays and the library of notable titles is almost 50% Rare.

With the GameCube, Nintendo was all “ok, lets make a really powerful system, technically more powerful than the PS2.” But then they kneecap it with the mini dvd which can only hold 1.4gb XD
Still one of the most impressive library of games from Nintendo. One of the best controllers from Nintendo. And I think the last time Nintendo was ever aggressive with the price point of their console.

The Wii was sorta Nintendo giving up on trying to go up against Sony/Microsoft and it worked for them. Overall the Wii was a solid system. The Virtual Console helped fill in the droughts between Nintendo titles by giving us older Nintendo titles to play. Third parties gave support in often times really weird ways, but still helped fill out the library. And there are some truly great games on the Wii.

Wii U was a marketing/branding disaster. While in my opinion the Wii U is the best Nintendo console since GC. It had the bonus of basically having the entire Wii library at launch and support for all of those Wii peripherals. More powerful than the 360, but of course not as powerful as the PS4/XBO that would release a year later. The Wii U had a fantastic library of games from Nintendo. And while I don’t think the tablet as a second screen ever really worked as well as the DS/3DS, I loved that it let me play most games from the tablet while my wife or kid was watching the TV. Mentioning my kid, it is also worth saying that the Wii U has a library of games that my 4 year old LOVES. Kirby’s Epic Yarn for Wii was played on Wii U, and then we played Yoshi’s Woolly World which I think is one of her all time favorite games right now.
The Wii U shouldn’t have failed, but Nintendo sure found a way.
With Nintendo ending all support for the Wii U in less than a year from when I’m writing this, I think it is worth mentioning that installing homebrew on the Wii U is super easy and basically lets you turn this system into the ultimate Nintendo Console, able to play almost every Nintendo game from the NES to the Wii U. That is the entire Zelda library of games at least until sometime next year!

So after a pretty short life, the WIi U is replaced by the Switch. The Switch isn’t significantly more powerful than the Wii U. And half of the Switch library is just ports of Wii U games. But it resolved the branding issue, the odd tablet design, and finally fulfilled the dream of playing on the toilet, any toilet!
I think one reason the Switch worked while the Wii U didn’t is because Nintendo dropped their handheld support. There is a good argument to be made that if you had a 3DS, you didn’t need a Wii U. There are a surprising number of Wii U games that had a 3DS version or similar enough that you didn’t feel the need for the far more expensive console. This also gave them more development resources to make games for the Switch. They had a fantastic library of games on the Wii U that were ready to port over to the Switch which also meant they didn’t have as many droughts. This didn’t stop Nintendo from making bad decisions though. The online with the Switch has been a huge mess, initially being free, but then going to a charged version. The entire voice chat mess and other features requiring you to use your phone to access. Save backups are basically unsupported for most games. Most annoying to me is that they started the VC support from scratch all over again, but this time its a subscription tied to the online. Made even worse with how N64 games are only part of the premium subscription.

This cycle of success and then failure is really common in the gaming industry. PS2 is one of the best selling consoles of all time, best library of games, and then they follow it up with the PS3 which is overly expensive, and hard to make games for. The 360 is the first to claim the HD generation, unseats Sony’s hold over gaming outside of Japan, and then completely whiffs with the Xbox One with its odd focus on TV, initial Kinect requirement, and pre-release marketing of requiring an always online internet connection.

I really like Nintendo. Their games and especially their handhelds have been part of my gaming library since I first got interested in games. But Nintendo really does seem to succeed despite itself a lot of the time.