It has been almost exactly 5 months since the MeltedJoystick crew went through the elaborate, Iwata-inspired ritual for unboxing my shiny, new WiiU (dead pixel and all). Since November, the MeltedJoystick crew enjoyed co-op playthroughs of “New Super Mario Bros U,” “Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed,” and “Nintendo Land” (maybe ‘enjoyed’ is too strong a word for that last one).
Our enjoyment of the WiiU lasted until the end of January… and it only lasted that long because we only gathered to play those games as a group once a week. Had those three games been single-player experiences, I think I would have blown through them alone by the middle of December.
While my first impressions of the WiiU were somewhat mixed, thanks in large part to the half-baked system software, slow load times, and the fact that the entire console seemed confused about whether it was a new console or a giant DS, my current impressions of the WiiU are much less flattering. It has been sitting next to its father, the original Wii, on my shelf, untouched for the past 3 months. Were it not for my accidentally turning it on while trying to re-sync one of my Wiimotes to the original Wii – and since it was on, I figured I may as well check for a firmware update (and there was one) – the WiiU would have stood silently as a ghost, staring at me with its monocular, glowing standby light, quietly siphoning power while providing nothing in return.
Thus I have decided that it’s time for the WiiU to go back into its box. A console with no games is not worth the electricity it burns in standby mode. And with no games on the horizon, the WiiU has come to serve no purpose in my entertainment center.
Is this the end? No, I don’t think so. Indeed, I don’t want this to be the end for the WiiU. With the competition from Microsoft and Sony looking like complete disasters-in-the-making, the WiiU might be the last bastion for true console-style gaming. Yet it would be foolish to deny that the WiiU, at this moment, is dead. The one first-party game I was looking forward to, “Pikmin 3,” is in release date limbo. Third-parties are abandoning the WiiU in droves, leaving us without hope that the scores of samey FPSes might release on the WiiU with enhanced Wiimote & Nunchuck style control schemes. And third-parties that can’t be bothered to release ports of their multi-platform games on the WiiU certainly can’t be bothered to expend any portion of their budget on brainstorming creative uses of Nintendo’s novelty controllers, even now that they no longer have the ‘anemic hardware’ excuse to fall back on.
But Nintendo is Nintendo. They have relied only on themselves since the N64, the console that caused third-parties to flee into the loving embrace of Sony’s PlayStation brand. WiiU owners should not expect great third-party products to appear on the console – those games should be considered delightful surprises when (if) they appear, much like the delightful third-party surprises that floated to the surface of the original Wii’s cesspit of a library. The big question, however, still remains: What the Hell is Nintendo doing?
That is a question to be answered next time. For now, enjoy the re-boxing video.
