A look back on the Wii

[baconian]

Just to not repeat what's been said, I'll leave out lots of what I agree with above, and mention a game no-one seems to know about: Cursed mountain. It seems a bit clunky and drab at first but in fact is atmospheric, beautiful, and has an interesting and genuine-feeling take on aspects of buddhism.

And as it was designed for the Wii late in the cycle it has some nice motion control aspects including a thing like Okami's brilliant drawing mechanic. Okami for the Wii, yes. I know it was a PS2 game first but only because Sony nabbed it with a cash advance. Perfect use of the Wiimote.

Playing NES donkey kong was cool too. And Mega Man 9!

I liked the Wii.

Also

It's funny how the GameCube has become a critic's darling after death, while everyone trashes on the hugely successful Wii. I'm not saying it's wrong to do so, but I definitely recall the gaming press starting to write off the GCN circa 2004 as a joke, despite Nintendo's slow-and-steady stream of fantastic releases.

I seem to remember this too.

[Iosef Stalin]

The thing with the Wii that eventually soured me on it, is just going through that whole cycle of being super excited for a couple of games, them coming out and then it's just a wasteland for six months or a year until the next big release. The third-party support was still shit for it, despite having the largest install base of that generation, just endless waggle shovelware, and crappy Wii versions of the multi platform releases.

And I think it's the system where I finally got tired of Nintendo's franchises, I mean the N64 brought them into 3D, the Gamecube upped the graphical fidelity hugely and had some great atmosphere and experiences. The Wii versions added... what? Basically the same stuff but with dodgy Wiimote controls and more idiot-proofing and general dumbing down and blandness. Mario Galaxy was really not that interesting of a game once you got past the "omg planetoids" phase. Metroid Prime 3 was good but didn't have the impact of the first Prime, Brawl was good but nothing really spectacular... Skyward Sword.... meh. It's all just so formulaic at this point. Wouldn't it be amazing if Nintendo gave their top tier franchises a break for one console and came up with all new stuff? Kinda bored of playing updated versions of games from the 1980s tbh.

[BFrank]

The experience you have with Other M is directly tied to how much you care about the story stuff. I'm not really committed to Samus as a character and didn't really care that they took a different direction with her.

The 'game' part of the game is quite good, and a direction I'd like to see the series go in. The Prime games were good, but they turned character movement into this slow, ponderous thing. Other M struck an interesting balance between 2D and 3D exploration.