Old school Nintendo was greaat. I loved my Nes and thought the Ses was the best thing ever! Modern Nintendo is still great but it just cant capture that spirit of gaming from my youth.

Well, they certainly hold the lion's share of my favourite games up until the early-2000s, However, while I find some aspects of the company a little disappointing now, the quality of the games they make that are designed for us gamers is unquestionable. I mean,this is the company that brought us the Mario Galaxy games (my favourite platformers of all time), Smash Bros Brawl (my favourite fighting game of all time), Skyward Sword, Animal Crossing, Pikmin, Pushmo, the Metroid Prime titles, and countless others.

So, while they could do with a few more blockbuster new IPs, I'd say quality has, at least, stayed the same.

Old Nintendo was not as lazy.

Animal Crossing on consoles is lazy. 3D Marios are color crazy- using excessive round colors for the sake of it as opposed to effortless implementation. Console Zeldas have lost their emphasis on GOOD music, and the artstyle (while cool for a one-off Wind Waker) was embarrassing for Skyward Sword. Enemy variety was also trash and the story was forgettable.

They released one too many Wii Play-like games, and Flingsmash was obviously unfocused and rushed. Wii Music was abysmal, period.

With Wii they were extremely reluctant to be aggressive. That resulted in games like Xenoblade not being localized fast enough and a wide majority of 1st party titles after 2008 not being promoted AT ALL in America.

Overall, for some reason, while Nintendo succeeds at being accessible for all, they took it overboard for too many titles. There is a reason why Mario Kart Wii is one of their biggest games, and it is because they implement works of the past better into the game. The Wii U will benefit Nintendo greatly because for at least 1 year, their games will be the apex of graphical presentation. It won't be as easy to pass of their games as lazy when you are distracted by dazzling graphics. Shallow, but true.

On the handheld side I have no complaints; they are still bringing the same heat they've had since I had that diesel Original Gameboy in 1995.

I think the N64 is the best console ever made, but then again how could it not with so many all-time favorites (at least, to me) and games considered to be the best in their genres.

For me, the N64 is not 'Modern Nintendo' though. I think the N64's 'philosophy' is similar to what it was in the SNES and NES days. Also the fact it is cartridge based make it to me the last of the 'classic'-age consoles. A point by the way I always defended against people claiming the Playstation was better because it was CD-based. I think Nintendo made the right decision, I hated the CD load times and the unreliability of them. It is too bad the vast majority of the 3rd party devs wanted storage space and low cost above all else.

I started gaming in what essentially was the SNES era, but at first I played more NES than SNES. My aunt was the 'gamer' of the family and she always had the consoles. When she got the SNES, her NES went to the guest room at my grandma's house where my cousins and I played hours upon hours of Duckhunt, Super Mario Bros. 1 and 3 and Soccer (the blackbox one).
SNES did got me interested in my all-time favorite franchise though; The Legend of Zelda. After my aunt got the Nintendo 64, the SNES went up to the attic, and later my cousin's room at their new house. There, while I finally had some consoles of my own, we played a lot of A Link to the Past, trying in vain to beat Ganon, and Yoshi's Island.

While the NES got me into gaming 'on the big scale', the SNES shaped my preferences. I'm not old enough to have been around for the start of the NES generation, so my gaming carrier was basically a Gen too late; I played 3rd Gen in the 4th Gen and 4th Gen in the 5th Gen (the latter along with the actual 5th Gen).

Those were the best times.

I think from the GameCube age onwards, Nintendo became a different company, not in the bad sense, but different.
Though I do find the GameCube and GameBoy Advance era to be the least interesting, so in that sense you could say I think the old Nintendo wins, but I don't necessarily rule anything from any Gen out.
I think it is because it seems in the 6th Gen era Nintendo hadn't yet found their new identity. I mean, everyone of their consoles had some sort of... all-encompassing idea, or novelty or innovation, whatever you want to call it. Everyone of them except for the GameCube and the GameBoy Advance, what did they have?

On the other hand, I think modern Nintendo is rapidly winning the handheld battle. For now, the GameBoy Color is still my favorite handheld of all-time, but the 3DS is gaining on it very fast. The sheer amount of awesome games both out and announced is already perplexing me. There has never been a console in my possession which gets this many support this early.
The DS certainly didn't amaze me this much, and the GameBoy Advance definitely didn't either. It surpassed the awesome original GameBoy by now in my mind, so only one more to go.

Every console has their share of memorable games though, and the offerings on GameCube, GameBoy Advance, Wii and DS were more than enough to keep me hooked on Nintendo primarily. I'm eager to see how they'll continue with 3DS and more importantly, WiiU.

Been gaming since Atari. In my opinion Nintendo's games are just as good as they used to be and in some cased much better.

The hardware, on the other hand, isn't always so great.

The NES was a graphical powerhouse of it's day and so was the SNES.

The N64 made the mistake of not using optical media.

The GameCube was great, but underutilized.

The Wii wasn't HD and it had mandatory motion controls that I still don't like.

The Wii U will still use motion controls and now it has a giant screen I don't want to use.

All I want from Nintendo is great Mario, Zelda, and Metroid games with standard controls. That's the difference between Nintendo of old and Nintendo of today. Unfortunately today's Nintendo thinks we all want to swing and swipe and touch and flail. I and many others don't.

The Old: Hiroshi Yamauchi NES-N64
The New: Satoru Iwata GC-Wii

1. The NES definitely wasn't the power house of it's day

2. I agree completely

3. This is because of the GameCube failing*

* reason being... they need an angle/novelty/innovation/gimmick (call it what you want) to differentiate itself from MS/Sony.

A lot of people yourself included say All I want from Nintendo is great Mario, Zelda, and Metroid games with standard controls. They did that, it was called the GameCube, it didn't sell well. If they carried on down that road the GameCube2 would have been Nintendos Dreamcast.

Nintendo pre-DS and Wii for me. Been a gamer since the mid 80s, and 1996-2002/3 were all great years as a Nintendo-only gamer too, despite the occasional drought of software here and there, but the triple A games that Nintendo and Rare routinely put out every year more than made up for it.

After Nintendo lost Rare, and refocused their business model on targeting the casual / family audience midway through the GC era and into this generation, it was all downhill with them for me. Mario Galaxy 1 and 2 and Prime 3 were the lone bright spots in what for me has easily been the worst generation of Nintendo gaming yet.

I like old Nintendo, they used to take a bit more risk with their games. Now they're probably worse than Square when it comes to milking franchises. They're games are still top notch though.

One thing I will say is that in terms of first party titles, Nintendo got way better with their first party titles on DS and Wii over previous generations. So I feel strongly that people who say that the "old days" were better for Nintendo as a first party, are a little confused.

The majority of their NES titles were less complex than Wii Sports; just look at Clu Clu Land, Tennis, Golf, Urban Champion, etc... These made up the majority of NES titles, with only a very small number (Metroid, Super Mario 1, 2, 3, Zelda 1, 2, Mother, Fire Emblem) being more complex gameplay experiences than Wii Sports. All of the games I mentioned combined have less complexity than Mario Galaxy. Super Mario 3 is far ahead of everything Nintendo developed on NES. Most of these NES titles are actually barely playable, and the only reason that we suffered through them in the 80's is because that is what was available - and it was better than nothing.

During the Wii/DS era, Nintendo was reaching new heights in their traditional games (Super Mario Galaxy and Galaxy 2 especially, but also in the RPG department with Golden Sun, Pokemon, Xenoblade, and continues to expand in that genre with the new Fire Emblem coming out soon); and at the same time not only establishing new genres (action Sports like Wii Sports), but excelling in success with them. I don't think any of Nintendo's previous generations has had quite so much power in the first party releases.

Not only has Nintendo expanded the number of releases in the last generation; but the overall quality is higher than previous generations in terms of first party releases.