Their last console that played the graphical arms race (and had a standard controller) was the Gamecube, and that was their least successful.

What's going for Sony, Microsoft and Valve are the third party market with exclusives to differentiate from one another. Nintendo is solely on gimmicks and exclusives.

Things like motion control and the gamepad are not gimmicks.

I voted negative 0 - "I think Online is the Anti-Christ." That sums up my views.

Anywho, what's with people and complaining about no online for 2D/3D Mario games? I would get annoyed at people who would try to play with me on those games. With local multi-player you can actually punch the person for being so bad at Mario.

I personally find very little enjoyment in online, infact the only games i've more then 20mins online with were the Halo games. Having said that I dont really play with friends or organise games, I just play with random people.

I appreciate that most people get a lot more out of it then I do, but I'd like for their to be more local multiplayer experiences on the XO and PS4.

Not motion control (if done right) but in my opinion....I'm sorry but the gamepad is a novel gimmick. The more I use it and think of certain gameplay design..... it always come out as a gimmick. There no good use of this thing ...besides Art Academy. It's useless. I want to use the Pro Controller, not the gamepad.

Games so far have not done a good job of utilising it but 2 screens has a great deal of potential, as the DS tells.

And surely, now that Sony too took the evil path of pay online multiplayer, a free one becomes a unique Wii U feature amongst 8th gen consoles. Ninty should just make it smooth enough, but also keep it simple enough to remain free, so maybe not now, but with the next price cut (no need to rush it, though, it would be counterproductive), when Wii U will be undeniably affordable, it will become a good selling point for the new buyers' demographics (OTOH, when PS4 and XBOne will become cheap, they'll need to make very good special offers on their pay multiplayer to keep them coherent with overall low price offers).

Is Nintendo blind? Nintendo shouldn't need a survey, just look at last gen with the 360/PS3 and how many were complaining about the original Wii's online play.

I love my Wii U as the next guy and I love nothing more than couch coop but there are many out there that can't do that. So online play is a great feature to have to get more people to play.

Graphics are only one part of hardware parity. You need to have a controller that allows third parties the abilty to release the game without having to drastically alter anything. The GC controller didn't have a full sized, industry standard second analog stick. The medium was a non standard, low compacity proprietary disc that would have caused games like GTA SA to span 6, or even 8 discs if it were released on the system. Throw in the whole lack of any online vision and what you basically have is a closed off, ugly red headed step child of a conole. It' pretty obvious as to why major third parties stayed away.

The N64 had the same issues as well. It only had one analog stick and used carts instead of CD as it's medium. As a result, third parties stayed sided with Sony. The last time Nintendo went with industry standard hardware/software was the SNES and it was also the last time they won the core market and had amazing third party support.

Coincidence?