T w e n t y S i d e d
The Nintendo Wii was lightning in a bottle. I remember it was a hard to find, in demand gift for Christmas one year and then suddenly every household I went to seemed to have one. I have an aunt and uncle who are very staunch Christians that adhere to a mostly closed-off rural lifestyle. They had dial-up internet until the mid 2010s. They’ve never had cable. Yet, they had a flatscreen, a Nintendo Wii, and several games for it.
It was a weird time. Video games went from a begrudgingly accepted, but mildly frowned upon hobby, to something the whole family could get in on. Everyone from grandma to the toddlers could swing the stick around. Needless to say, the barrier for entry was near non-existent. It was a way to bring the family together over something new and fun. I, specifically, have a very fond memory of everyone getting together to play Wii Sports and Guitar Hero 3 one Christmas.
The wii, for all intents and purposes, was an unmitigated success. I should have been in the peak of video game bliss. Only problem was that I hated the Wii’s motion controls. They were imprecise and laggy. Everyone else was having fun waving their hands around and hoping for the best, while I got pissed off because “these games aren’t even hard, the controls just suck.” In fairness to myself here, I wasn’t wrong. Prior to the release of the Motion+ release the system was very hit and miss on its tracking. Also, the Wii didn’t exactly have a long list of heavy-hitting titles for the less casual gamer. There were several rail shooters that were great. I still look back finally at Twilight Princess and Smash Bros. Brawl. But, other than that, the wii games frustrated me more than entertained me. So, I was more than happy to turn my nose up when I noticed just how much shovelware got poured onto the market. Soooooo many minigame collections.
What this all boiled down to is an angsty teenage me refusing to engage with what I considered to be beneath me. Instead of embracing the fun despite the limitations, I chose to be superior. This is something I’ve come to regret. I miss the times where people actually took an interest in one of my hobbies of choice. Sure, I’ve had a taste of that feeling again with VR, but it’s far harder to convince people to take a turn when just starting a game means reconfiguring things for each person who wants to play. Throw on the need I have to avoid Meta’s store like the plague, and you have me lugging my PC back and forth just to maybe convince people to give it a try. It’s simply not the same.
With “Stage Tour” coming soon, I’m hoping that some of that spirit can be rekindled. I’m happy to schlep my PS5 places if it means I can spend an hour or two goofing around with my friends and family and playing what amounts to a complicated game of karaoke. Well, I can always hope anyway.
Please find 2007 me shredding a song on easy cool. It’s very important to him.
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Oh and if you were wondering where the post was last week, I was up to some devious shenanigans. True adventurous nonsense. Some real high stakes buffoonery.
I bought a new phone and forgot to verify that my apps properly transferred over… including my 2FA apps. I had a 3 day anxiety attack while trying to pull things together and took the week off.
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The biggest mistake most people made with Wii controls was always “swinging their arms around.” Granted, the advertising and casual games basically endorsed it, showing this in all their vidoes and tutorials. But if you want precise control, you need precise motion. The number of people who turned up their noses at Skyward Sword because they couldn’t handle the motion controls, at least from people I talked to, is crazy. It’s not hard. You sit, you get your arm in a comfortable position, you make little wrist movements. Swish swish, flick of the wrist, precise fencing, cut them to pieces along the clearly telegraphed lines you’re meant to cut them to pieces by. And then there was Metroid Prime collection with proper free look, but oh no, the very first Bond game’s first person aiming was bad so no one could possibly have improved on it, Wii shooters suck *gigantic eyeroll*.
And now all the rubber grip covers, apparently made from some horrible choice of petroleum product, have been weeping sticky stuff for years, making them unusable. The switches have motion controls which are only ever used in a minigame collection here or there, because no one wants to spend the time to make games that use them, because anything that wasn’t a minigame collection got dragged through the mud people by people with zero learning ability. Sigh. Or at least that’s what I assume, since I can’t say I actually followed Switch games worth a damn, but all I ever hear is like oh hey one very specific game is using the IR bits on the Switch 2 controllers like a mouse, how daring!
Actually, that’s not being fair to myself. I follow ANN’s games column and LRR’s Checkpoint every week. That’s a perfectly normal amount of attention.
Misspelled ‘nostalgia’ in the title, boss.
I kinda checked out of home consoles after the PS2, my cousin did get a Wii and I got to play a bit of Twilight Princess on it, but that’s all I can remember, I can’t recall the experience at all. I think I also got to play some bowling game on it, which was even more terrible than actual bowling.
Also, Nintendo, for all their faults (and they are many) has for a long time been good at getting people into gaming. Before the Wii it was the GameBoy (I can’t tell you how many kids at school had one for playing Pokemon on), which I think is the number 2 or 3 best selling console ever.
Three people including myself proofread this article but two of us are dyslexic and one was exhausted. Thank you for spotting it. lmao
I may also be going senile, but I think the whole article wasn’t on the front page before? Which is very nostalgic, by the way.
Heck, even before the Game Boy, the NES managed to get almost the whole dang country into gaming (myself included!), even after The Big Video Game Crash soured people on the concept. It got to the point where every older person in the late 80’s thru the 90’s called all video games “nintendos”, much to our amusement/frustration.
I’m actually trying to put my finger on the exact moment when gaming really became mainstream, in the sense that nearly every member of society had at least TRIED some kind of game. I think it was probably sometime in the late 00’s or early 2010’s, when mobile gaming first started to spread its wings and games like Farmville and Candy Crush became near omni-present. They attracted even the older crowd of parents and aunts/uncles, where there was a good chance that even older generations had at least a 50/50 chance of being into SOME kind of gaming.
You are diseased. Seek help.
Now, now, not liking Nintendo consoles may be an unusual opinion, but it’s hardly a disease (otherwise it’s one I carry myself). And being a little kinder wouldn’t hurt, other people have feelings too, even if they are randos on the internet.
The authenticator nonsense really is a nightmare. When my phone broke and thus couldn’t transfer authentication privileges and also couldn’t authenticate things it was a real headache. Microsoft in particular was pretty bad I recall, though not sure how or why. Now I have the authenticator app on both my phone and my tablet as a backup.
Ah. Couch Coop/HotSeat/Versus. The good old days of Guitar Hero, Tony Hawk Pro Skater, Worms and Soul Calibur 3. I recently introduced GH3 to some young folks who didn’t know it. We had lots of fun – until the controller broke. A controller that isn’t produced anymore, which makes it irreplaceable – Damn it.
I then ordered the “new” GH, which has a new type of controller, that is incompatible with GH3 – Damn it x2.
THPS 1 plus 2 on the other hand: Still fun.
Sharing VR experience is hard. The different acceptance to motion sickness by different people is an additional factor. (The right controller helps. Project Cars with an XBox controller and you’ll ruin your day; Project Cars with a Logitech Wheel and you can play for hours. And because everyone is sitting, you don’t have to be reconfiguring all the time)
I heard: The best software to introduce VR to other people is google Earth VR. Teleporting through cities and countries you never visited or will visit is a treat. Motion sickness is not a problem because you are just looking inside a picture dome and teleporting from picture dome to picture dome. All those pictures are taken from the same height – configuring the headset is low effort.
How to describe living through the Wii era?
I think it was at its best for local co-op games with family and friends. Nintendo games had their Nintendo polish, but the motion controls were either limited or counterproductive. When it worked, it worked.
They tried again with the WiiU. They tried harder to please everyone, including the hardcore audience, which was migrating to full HD (1080p) from the 720p that the WiiU could barely manage. When its asynchronous multiplayer worked, like for Nintendo Land, it was a lot of fun! When it got in its own way, like Star Fox Zero requiring you to split your attention and use motion controls, it was physically painful.
I loved the dual screen era of games, but the WiiU proved that it couldn’t work on a living room TV. I wish it had.
I like the idea of being able to play your game in the living room while the family watches TV together, but consumer habits changed.
I could go on. I miss the more experimental era of Nintendo, even though I concede that the switch is a success because of lessons learned making the WiiU.
Heck, many of the great switch games were originally on the WiiU. Many WiiU games were rereleases from the Wii.
I feel like I’m wandering into the “just play on PC” argument?