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I choose...

N64 56 48.28%
 
Wii 60 51.72%
 
Total:116
h2ohno on 06 May 2019
colafitte said:
RolStoppable said:

If you look at the NeoGAF thread with the shipment data again, the SNES and Wii both lasted the same time. Shipments in their eighth fiscal year became negligible, about ~1.5m each. I hope you noticed that the Wii data isn't complete because the thread was created before the Wii was discontinued.

I'd call Skyward Sword a bad Zelda game. And after Breath of the Wild, even most of those who defended Skyward Sword for years have come around to adjust their opinions of SS. Much of Wii's success was based on getting back to the basics, i.e. doing what made Nintendo big in the first place with the NES. If you browse the bestsellers list of the NES, you will notice that simple sports games like Golf and Tennis have sold quite a lot of copies; the modern version of those games was Wii Sports. Wii Play modernized games like Pong, Duck Hunt and Combat. New Super Mario Bros. Wii was the first new 2D Mario game on a home console since 1990's Super Mario World.

Skyward Sword missed the mark spectacularly because it is the most linear Zelda game whereas the original Zelda on the NES offered an open world to explore. If you wonder about Breath of the Wild's success, Nintendo's developers created a prototype of BotW with NES graphics and really used the original Zelda game as their inspiration. SS and BotW have a difference like night and day, and that means that SS won't sell big numbers on any console because it doesn't meet the expectations that the market at large has towards a Zelda game.

Your huge paragraph contains a lot of rambling, but it also provides the explanation for it. You've made up your mind and you aren't going to change it. The only thing I want to touch on is that the 3DS did not really fine because it caused Nintendo's first loss in a full financial year since they had started making video games.

SNES lasted since 1990 to 1999 according to that data, Wii didn't last that much. But i guess, i am not going to get you to understand my point. The point was basically the decline Wii suffered in question of 2-3 years that no console has ever suffered at the same degree. Every console basically declines at some point, Nintendo consoles usually decline at the same time, PS consoles last longer, X360 lasted even longer than PS3. But even between Nintendo consoles, no console went to sell more than 20M to 5M in a matter of 3 years (using VGC numbers). It was just an anecdotal data, a curiousity, i wasn't trying to convince anybody, but it was just a number. I wasn't trying to figure out the reasons why it happened. It just happened. One day it was the hottest item in gaming and the other day is was not. Just that.

As for Skyward Sword. I liked a lot the visual artstyle, but everything else was a drag. It's one of the games that i consider overrated just because of the name of the franchise. It was not a bad game, but no a 90+ game either. BOTW was what the Zelda franchise needed...for years. It still not perfect in my opinion, but it was in the right direction nonetheless.

I get your point on Wii going back to basics, but i don't agree on that as much because it was N64 the console who started the modern Mario Golfs, Mario Tennis, Mario Partys, ...Wii Sports and Wii Play were just the same concept only this time with motion controls. And 2D Mario, yes, but it came in 2009, when Wii was already phenomenon everywhere, hardly the reason of why Wii had sold so much until then. I'll admit it helped the Wii to keep selling a lot though.

And that paragraph was not rambling. It was a polite way to say that your arguments do not convince me to change my opinion. But i guess this site can't accept other opinions. "You are with me or against me" mentality. I think a lot what i say here, and of course i won't change my opinion here just because an argument in a afternoon. Who i am, like Ross when Phoebe forces him to admit maybe he was wrong in his ideals??. I thought the same in 2009 (when i didn't understood then why Wii was selling so much), i thought the same in 2012 when WiiU launched, and i still think the same in 2019. I don't expect you changing your opinion either. Let's accept we are on different points of view, and let's finish it here, in good terms.

No Nintendo console has sold 20 million in a year to begin with.

Going by fiscal years, the Wii sold 5.84 million in 2007, 18.61 in 2008, 25.95 in 2009, 20.53 in 2010, 15.08 in 2011, 9.84 in 2012, 3.98 in 2013, 1.22 million in 2014, and was still being tracked at over 100,000 in 2016, it's 10th year on the market.

Saying that a decline from nearly 26 million to less than 10 million 3 years later is a huge decline is accurate, but it's a decline to numbers which are very close to the best years the SNES ever had, 1992 and 1993.  No Nintendo home console has ever sold nearly 10 million units in its sixth year except the Wii.  Most consoles peak at around that number in year 2 or 3, and some never reach it at all.  The Wii in its sixth year outsold the best years of the N64 (9.42 million), the Gamecube (5.76 million), and the Xbox (4.4 million).  Even going well into the next gen like year 8 the Wii was selling on par with the SNES.  The SNES in 1997 (counting 8 years from the launch of the Super Famicom, not the SNES in the US) sold 1.28 million units, compared to 1.22 million for the Wii's 8th year.  If you count 1998 as the SNES' 8th year after its international launch the comparison goes in the Wii's favor, and if you count it as the 9th year the Wii still come's out on top by nearly double compared to its own 9th year.  In the 10th year as well Wii reached 6 digits where the SNES didn't manage it.

It just goes to show how freaking insane the Wii's sales were that even after falling so much they still compared so favorably to Nintendo's other consoles.  2009 Wii was the best year any home console has ever had and it outsold the entire lifetime shipments of both the Gamecube and the XBox in that 1 year.



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super_etecoon on 06 May 2019

The Wii created gamers. The Wii has Twilight Princess, Metroid Prime 3, Little King's Story, Super Mario Wii, Mario Galaxy 1 and 2, Fluidity, Wii Sports, New Play Control Pikmin, Metroid Prime Trilogy, , Boom Blox, Excite Truck Trick Racing, Excitebots, Zack and Wiki, Smash Bros Brawl, Deadly Creatures, Elebits, Resident Evil 4 with pointer controls, and that Virtual Console.

The N64 had Ocarina of Time, Mario 64, and Goldeneye...and that's it...Smash Bros didn't get great until Melee. The only generation for Nintendo that I skipped. I know there are many folks of a certain age that really enjoyed this area, and I won't belittle your childhood, but you must remember that the goggles of nostalgia are almost impossible to remove.



curl-6 on 06 May 2019
colafitte said:
curl-6 said:

The former is not a "fact" and the latter "proves" no such thing.

The Wii lasted for a normal Nintendo console lifespan. It is no more a "fad" than any other system that lasted 5-6 years. The idea that "people quickly got tired of motion controls" is not supported by the evidence either. We are more than 12 years passed the release of the Wii now and motion controls are alive and well and here to stay. If they were a fad they'd be long gone by now, yet they are featuring in basically every major Switch game.

Wii just lasted like a normal "failure" Nintendo console lifespan but it definitively did not lasted selling well as long as NES, SNES or DS, and it seems it won't last as long as Switch either. In its 6th year, Wii was selling almost 4x less than just 3 years before. NES, SNES, DS, PS, PS2, X360, PS3, PS4, all lasted more than 6 years, and they were not selling 4x less in its 6th year compared to its 3rd....That was unprecedented in a console that sold as well as Wii in its first few years. Every time you see a graphic showing sales of different consoles you can see how Wii drops in sales way more heavily than any other comparable console. 

Despite N64 being considered a failure compared to PS1, Nintendo went from selling 49M with SNES to 33M with N64 and to 22M with GC. With Wii they went from 102M to barely 15M.

There's a reason why 2012-2016 are one of the least succesfully financial years for Nintendo in its history, and it wasn't because they started suddenly making bad games during those years (in fact it started their most creative years since N64 era). It's because Wii wasn't able to transfer their success into the future. I'm pretty sure more people are going to be hyped by the Switch successor than they were for the Wii back then.

And to explain my point, i was referring to motion controls as the use of nunchuks in Nintendo games. You don't have to play anymore Mario 3D games, Zelda games, ...only with just that technology. Nintendo backtracked and offered conventional gameplay as its main way to play the games. Yes, there's still motion control features (optional if you want), but you basically play most Switch games in conventional ways again and the most prefered way to play those games is with a classic pad style. Wii main characteristic was its Nunchuk controls. In 2006 it seemed this was going to be the next way of how to play videogames, but here we are in 2019 and people prefer a conventional pad again. I will bet my money, that most people prefer now playing their Nintendo games with a pad than with those nunchuks. That was the "fad" part of my point, the games in itself were not a fad, they were great in fact.

Wii sales dropped off because Nintendo abandoned it early in order to move their teams onto 3DS and Wii U. They simply continued their standard 5 year console strategy, while the increasing demands of supporting two platform lines with increasing game complexity (3DS and the HD Wii U) soaked up all of their development resources and starved the Wii of getting end-of-life support. When the games stopped, naturally sales slowed.

And Wii U failed on its own terms, that has no more to do with Wii than PS3's massive drop in sales and loss of market leader position has to do with PS2. Nintendo made basically every possible wrong decision in the years from 2012-2016, that is why they sold poorly during that time. As we have seen with the Switch now selling like crack, gamers buy (or don't buy) platforms on their own merits, not based on their predecessors.

As for claims that motion controls were a "fad", a fad is something that is wildly popular for a very short time then disappears overnight. Motion controls didn't disappear, they're still here more than 12 years after the Wii came out, hence they don't fit the definition of a fad.

Last edited by curl-6 - on 06 May 2019

Illusion on 06 May 2019

One of the things that made the N64 such a hit was that it was such a great party machine. It introduced 4 player multiplayer (in the modern context of today's consoles) and had some of the greatest multiplayer games of the generation: Goldeneye, Mario Kart, Mario Party(s), Mario Golf Super Smash Bros, etc... The reality is, though, that the Wii does everything that the N64 did in terms of multiplayer gaming but better. Many of the multiplayer hits on the Wii found their beginnings on the N64, but the Wii obviously takes things to the next level.

Given that the Wii kills the N64 on the multiplayer card, that mainly leaves the single player experiences. Again, Mario Galaxy is a natural progression and improvement on the ground broken in Mario 64. Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword are also just progressions on the basic genre that was created by Ocarina of Time but obviously the graphics are better. Really, if you were to pick a console today there would be no reason to choose the N64 over the Wii especially since many of the N64's greatest games were essentially updated and improved on Wii versions. Furthermore, the N64 has almost no RPG games (one of the best genre's for retro gaming) thanks to the data limits of the cartridge.

Despite all of this, though, I do believe that the N64 is better and for one simple reason: it came out 10 years before the Wii.  The N64 established the genre's that the Wii basically just annualized and updated. While the Wii offers these same experiences with more polish and glitter and is more friendly to the modern gaming audience than the N64 is, you can't put it in the same category as the N64.  The N64 took enormous risk by establishing much of contemporary 3D gaming, the only truly original thing that the Wii came up with was motion controls which were basically a fad that didn't have a lasting impact.

Last edited by Illusion - on 06 May 2019

GoOnKid on 06 May 2019
Illusion said:

One of the things that made the N64 such a hit was that it was such a great party machine. It introduced 4 player multiplayer (in the modern context of today's consoles) and had some of the greatest multiplayer games of the generation: Goldeneye, Mario Kart, Mario Party(s), Mario Golf Super Smash Bros, etc... The reality is, though, that the Wii does everything that the N64 did in terms of multiplayer gaming but better. Many of the multiplayer hits on the Wii found their beginnings on the N64, but the Wii obviously takes things to the next level.

Given that the Wii kills the N64 on the multiplayer card, that mainly leaves the single player experiences. Again, Mario Galaxy is a natural progression and improvement on the ground broken in Mario 64. Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword are also just progressions on the basic genre that was created by Ocarina of Time but obviously the graphics are better. Really, if you were to pick a console today there would be no reason to choose the N64 over the Wii especially since many of the N64's greatest games were essentially updated and improved on Wii versions. Furthermore, the N64 has almost no RPG games (one of the best genre's for retro gaming) thanks to the data limits of the cartridge.

Despite all of this, though, I do believe that the N64 is better and for one simple reason: it came out 10 years before the Wii.  The N64 established the genre's that the Wii basically just annualized and updated. While the Wii offers these same experiences with more polish and glitter and is more friendly to the modern gaming audience than the N64 is, you can't put it in the same category as the N64.  The N64 took enormous risk by establishing much of contemporary 3D gaming, the only truly original thing that the Wii came up with was motion controls which were basically a fad that didn't have a lasting impact.

Oh no, you too? We already have colafitte telling us that motion controls are a fad because he wants it to be that way while ignoring every counter argument and evidence against this ridiculously false claim.



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Illusion on 07 May 2019

Oh no, you too? We already have colafitte telling us that motion controls are a fad because he wants it to be that way while ignoring every counter argument and evidence against this ridiculously false claim.

It has elements of being a fad.  The N64 introduced force feedback and that was something similar.  Of course, every single game uses force feedback but that doesn't mean that Star Fox 64 was some kind of industry-transforming game.  It introduced something that was a legitimate game play mechanic and then everybody adopted and then basically forgot about.

Mario 64, Goldeneye and OOT, on the other hand, are games that are recognized as being pioneers that fundamentally changed the way we play games from that point on.  These games are viewed as being key turning points in the industry.  The Wii introduced something that could have been a key turning point in how we play games (ie. Wii Fit) but then the next generation more or less returned to the traditional model for making games which tells me that it lacked the transformative effect that the N64 had on gaming.  If, on the other hand, the PS4 was pumping out mainly Wii-era quality of life games then I would agree with you that the Wii had the influence that the N64 had. 

As for proof of this, I do not have proof as this is just an opinion.  Feel free to disagree with me.

Last edited by Illusion - on 07 May 2019

curl-6 on 07 May 2019
Illusion said:

motion controls which were basically a fad

Fads burn out quickly and disappear. Motion controls are still around 12+ years after the release of the Wii and show no sign of disappearing any time in the foreseeable future. They're not a fad, they'd be long gone by now if they were.

Last edited by curl-6 - on 07 May 2019

Illusion on 07 May 2019
curl-6 said:
Illusion said:

motion controls which were basically a fad

Fads burn out quickly and disappear. Motion controls are still around 12+ years after the release of the Wii and show no sing of disappearing any time in the foreseeable future. They're not a fad, they'd be long gone by now if they were.

It was adopted (like the rumble pak) as being a legitimate gameplay mechanic.  The popularity that motion controls have today vs. in 2008 are like 1/100 the amount.  In 2008 people bought a console primarily for the motion controls, today they would not.  That demonstrates the drop-off.  Pokemon was also a fad back in the 90's, that said it doesn't mean that it isn't still very popular (to a lesser degree then it was) or that it can occasionally stage a comeback (ie. Pokemon Go).



curl-6 on 07 May 2019
Illusion said:
curl-6 said:

Fads burn out quickly and disappear. Motion controls are still around 12+ years after the release of the Wii and show no sing of disappearing any time in the foreseeable future. They're not a fad, they'd be long gone by now if they were.

It was adopted (like the rumble pak) as being a legitimate gameplay mechanic.  The popularity that motion controls have today vs. in 2008 are like 1/100 the amount.  In 2008 people bought a console primarily for the motion controls, today they would not.  That demonstrates the drop-off.  Pokemon was also a fad back in the 90's, that said it doesn't mean that it isn't still very popular (to a lesser degree then it was) or that it can occasionally stage a comeback (ie. Pokemon Go).

Part of what makes a fad a fad is that they fade away and disappear overnight. Motion controls did not disappear, they are still around and featuring prominently in popular mainstream games well over a decade after their introduction. There's nothing to suggest they won't still be around in another decade. 



Jumpin on 07 May 2019

Motion controls are fairly well integrated into everything from consoles like the Switch, to mobile, and VR.

Additionally, someone up above claimed the Wii didn’t last as long as the SNES. This is false, the two consoles were actually very close, but the Wii enjoyed slightly more long term success. It peaked in sales during its third year (SNES in its second) and tailed out a little longer, with Wii selling 4 million units in its 7th year and SNES only 1 million (or about 2% of SNES’s total sales in year 7 versus about 4% of Wii’s).

NES isn’t a valid comparison of an example of a successful strategy due to it being an unusual situation. Two of the major markets (Japan and US) had a lack of competition for years due to their video game industry collapses, but in countries where it DID have competition it only lasted 2-4 years.



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