If you want to make somebody feel old, one of the most surefire ways is telling them something that made a major impact on their childhood was created a long time ago. Like many kids, I grew up playing video games. While most of the kids at school always talked about the hot new PlayStation or Xbox games, my console of choice came from Nintendo.
My console was the Nintendo Wii, and it was perfect for Mii. While the kids of yesteryear were screeching profanity and death threats at each other while playing Call of Duty, I was left to my own devices. Those being a remote and a nunchuck connected to each other with an umbilical cord.
During the yearly Christmas get-together at a family member’s house, the video game selection at the function were consoles I had never seen before, and games whose titles felt uninspiring. I don’t like playing sports in real life, so playing a video game about basketball with the “NBA top MVP’s” didn’t mean anything to me. The closest I ever got to a sports title was MAP, the most abused player, when I got smacked into the next Tuesday by a Soccer ball that was frozen solid. I didn’t like recess either.
Playing the Wii, however, made me take an ironic twist on my idea of sports. Probably one of my favorite picks for the Wii was the ever iconic Wii Sports. It featured a smorgasbord of fun times in games like baseball, boxing, tennis, and somehow made golf seem interesting to me, but the best one was bowling. While these were not 100% accurate portrayals of these sports, they were fun.
A big part of growing up involved summer weekends at my Nana and Poppop’s, as childhood me called it, seashore house in Ocean City New Jersey. I’m biased against anything else, sorry Maryland. Our normal routine involved waking up early and spending most of the day on the beach, but when we would all get home and get hosed off, we would have dinner. The night would go one of two ways, we could go to the boardwalk or stay home. The latter included everyone playing Wii Sports.
The part that made the Wii able to connect so many people was that each person could have their own avatar, known as a Mii. My mom, dad, uncle, even my grandparents had Mii’s made for them. Most of the time the “crew” that was at the seashore house was my Nana, Mom, Uncle, and myself, which was perfect for the 4 person limit.
Another set of games I really enjoyed came from the Mario series. New Super Mario Bros. Wii, Mario Party 9, Mario Galaxy, and Mario Kart Wii. Getting every star coin, every power star, 100%’ing every game gave me a huge sense of accomplishment.
Now I don’t know if you’ve asked “where did we go wrong” but I sure have, and yet, I think I know the answer. Companies realized they could charge more money for a product with less features. At least when the WiiU came out, you could still play the old Wii games on the new system and just buy the new games to go with it. When the Nintendo Switch came out, it was obvious you couldn’t fit a cd into it. But you would’ve thought they would’ve done the same deal with the Switch 2 when it was time to upgrade. Play the old games you already love on the new system, and then buy the new ones as they release them. Did they do that? No, no they didn’t. Obviously Nintendo won’t make Switch 2 games for the original Switch, that defeats the purpose of buying the new system.
In the midst of all these upgrades to hardware, we lost the charm that made the original games we all fell in love with so iconic. The Wii games didn’t look realistic, because they couldn’t. But also, they didn’t have to. We didn’t always have the technology to make first person shooters with enough detail it felt like you were part of WW2. Everybody used to make something that just worked. But as we got older, and the concept of becoming an adult dawned on us, our games went from supplementing the reality we all wish we could reject for just a brief moment, to an exact replica. I’m not saying realistic games are bad, but they don’t have the same pizazz as the ones I’ve grown up playing.
Those who played the Wii might remember the game would tell you when you had been playing for a while, and would encourage you to take a break. Now, these companies don’t care. They want us to keep playing, and keep paying. Nintendo is no stranger to releasing ports of the older games on the newer systems that one can download online, but they’d have to pay for them again.
The games are in no way gone, Nintendo knows we still love them.
Like us, our consoles have stood the test of time. While most may have moved on, my own Wii sits stashed away on a shelf, as a gentle reminder of my favorite pass time. This vertical cd player was made 20 years ago, and it serves as a reminder of a simpler time. When new games came out I used to get excited. Now, I just sit back and say “good god”.
Wii, are unc.
