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Soundwave on 27 December 2015
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curl-6 said:
Soundwave said:

To be honest the Wii era was kind of a bust for Nintendo fans in a lot of ways.

We were always sold this line that with a big userbase we'd finally have all these great third party games, but the system was so underpowered that it got nothing but crappy spin-off games or a ton of shovelware mini-game titles.

Great for soccer moms or if you wanted a weight loss fad, but not really great if you actually wanted to play quality games.

The best Nintendo games for the system, things like Super Mario Galaxy 1/2, Xenoblade, Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Mario Kart Wii, Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze, NSMBU, Zelda: TP honestly would play just as well/better with a regular controller, and even the aiming in Metroid Prime 3 ... Splatoon has shown you can do that just fine with a regular pad.

So essentially that era ended up with Nintendo fans, most of whom had a GameCube, which was $99 by 2003, paying 2.5x that cost for basically the same hardware slightly upclocked, a piddly amount of on-board storage, with a new controller.

And we got no graphics/hardware update for 6 years, being stuck playing our games in SD resolution when most of us had HDTVs for years.

Honestly there's very little the Wiimote actually brought to the table of a Nintendo fan other than bragging rights on internet forums because Nintendo was selling a lot of product to fickle soccer moms/casuals for a couple of years. It didn't make the games better.

Even the whole "well Nintendo will make so much money off these casual gamers that surely they'll in turn spend that money on awesome new studios, like how they used to have Rare in the past!" ... that turned out to be a bust too as Nintendo barely invested in any new 2nd party studios.

As a Nintendo fan and a hardcore gamer, I gotta completely disagree with you there.

If you ask me, Nintendo's first party output on the Wii is some of their very best, right up there with the SNES and N64. Mario Galaxy 1 & 2 are among the finest games they have ever created, and I'd argue that both these and games like Metroid Prime 3 and Skyward Sword would not have been as enjoyable without pointer/motion controls.

As for third party games, there was plenty worth playing; look passed the shovelware and there were gems like Sin & Punishment 2, Tatsunoko vs Capcom, Monster Hunter Tri, The Last Story, Goldeneye 007, Little King's Story, Silent Hill Shattered Memories, etc.

I'd rank the Wii above the Wii U, above the Gamecube, above the PS3 or the Xbox 360.

 

Wii had good Nintendo games, but every Nintendo system has good Nintendo games, because well Nintendo makes good games. 

Super Mario Galaxy 1/2 really don't need the Wiimote, it's kinda shoe horned in, but basically the same game could've been made on a traditional pad for all intents and purposes. That game would've been as good/better if Nintendo had made it for a traditional HD system, because you would have gotten to play them in 720p HD at least. The Galaxy games were great despite the system they were on, not because of the system they were on. 

I did really like the pointer aiming of the Wiimote, but Splatoon has made me a believer that you can have the same pointer controls with a standard type pad, so you don't need a Wiimote for that. 

Zelda: SS ... no one is really begging to have motion controls back, it was more of "yeah that's kinda neat ... I guess" type thing, but everyone seems OK with the next Zelda ditching those controls, so how vital were they to the Zelda franchise really? Considering it took them like 4-5 years to make this game, it was somewhat underwhelming to be honest. 

There's just no benefit to this control scheme I can see going forward. Casuals are happy playing their smartphone games, even Nintendo has effectively conceded this by going third party on smart devices because they can't get this crowd back. 

If you're not going to win that soccer mom/casual/I play games once a month when grandpa comes over crowd ... there's no sense in going back to the Wiimote. A regular pad can do the pointer stuff just fine. A motion control simply doesn't have the accuray of a button press. I think maybe it's just time to accept that joysticks + d-pads + buttons are the optimal way to play serious/deep video games. Nintendo invented the layout in many ways themselves, maybe it's just time to stop trying to reinvent the wheel and rather focus on creating a platform that appeals to a wide range of consumers and developers.