A temporary revolution: our tribute to Nintendo’s Wii

October 21st, 2013, 21:30 Posted By: wraggster

This morning, having sold over 100 million units worldwide, Nintendo ceased production on the console that secretly won this generation.Wii shouldn’t have worked. Its name, its controller, its outdated innards, a launch line-up without Mario. It was, of course, a sensation for the very same reasons. For a few golden years following its launch in 2006, Nintendo was single-handedly responsible for the game industry’s spectacular growth. Xbox 360 and PS3 preached to the converted; they were more of the same, just bigger, more powerful and more connected. In 2013, as we sit on the verge of a new generation, that sounds awfully familiar.Nintendo wanted more. The story goes that Nintendo, focus testing ideas for its next console, invited a range of ordinary people into a mock-up of a normal living room with two items on the coffee table, a traditional videogame controller and a remote control. The subjects always picked up the remote control first; most were bewildered by what the videogame controller had become, a muddled multitude of sticks, triggers and buttons.Though for traditional audiences Twilight Princess was the must-have launch game, Wii was better defined by its pack-in game – we’d seen party games and minigame compilations before, but none like Wii Sports.The term ‘killer app’ has been softened with over-use through the years, but here was a game which truly justified that description – every swing of virtual racquet turned doubters into believers, and sceptics into players. Without a plumber in sight, briefly, the world became entranced with this kooky, approachable machine from Kyoto. Even the tabloids were seduced – tales of the Queen indulging in a spot of Wii bowling at Buckingham Palace and Wii Fit weight loss were brief respite from the usual ‘murder by PlayStation’ sensationalism. Sadly, normal service has now resumed.Indeed, let’s not forget how important Wii Fit once was to changing perceptions of our industry; allied with Wii Sports’ more active style of play, it turned the Wii into the console it was okay for ‘normal’ people to own; one criticism, that attach rates were unusually low, missed the point entirely. Nintendo had introduced its console into an unprecedented number of homes that have never owned, let alone been interested in, videogame hardware ever before. Surely that was a victory worth celebrating.One doubts that Nintendo was unhappy that its console was often only wheeled out for special occasions, too. It became the good times console – the party starter that would prop up otherwise dull family gatherings and, indeed, inspire post-pub multiplayer long into the night. It’s hardly a legacy to be disappointed with, and for players more familiar with Nintendo’s heritage, there was Mario Kart Wii, surely one of the biggest selling and most-played multiplayer games of all time.There were delights for solitary players, of course. For me, Resident Evil 4′s tense gunplay was never better than in the Wii edition, the satisfaction and immediacy of its point-and-shoot controls lending Capcom’s opus even greater drama. Another improved GameCube port, Twilight Princess, was a vast, varied and captivating adventure, and one that remains strangely underappreciated within the Zelda series. Two Super Mario Galaxy games showed Nintendo at its wildest and most inventive, the second effectively rolling up the platform genre into one dense, immaculate, unimprovable space odyssey. Skyward Sword, meanwhile, packaged up the Wii era with something the platform has always been crying out for – a core-focused fan-pleaser which actually justified its use of motion technology.Move and Kinect didn’t even come close to what Wii achieved, though they clearly intended to. For a while, it seemed as if motion control was the future. It wasn’t – instead, immediacy, accessibility and true mainstream play can be found lurking behind the touchscreens on smartphones and tablets, in numbers far beyond what any mere game console can dream of. A new generation of players will be raised not by Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft, but Apple, Samsung and Google.

http://www.edge-online.com/features/...nintendos-wii/

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