As a very small child I was enthralled by my aunt's SNES.
I grew up with an N64 that I loved to death.
I got a Gamecube in middle school, and for several years my life as a gamer revolved around that beautiful little plastic box and the utterly fantastic array of games it had.
All throughout I played Pokemon to death on my Game Boy Pocket and then Color, eagerly snatching up the GBA and DS.
I stood in line to buy a Wii on launch day. I got Red Steel and Twilight Princess with it.
I never finished Red Steel, and I quickly came to wish that I had waited for the Gamecube TP. I eventually had my fun with Mario Galaxy, had some passing fun with unremarkable motion collections like raving rabbids and boom blox. But it didn't take long for the shine of the Revolution to dull, for it to sink in that the wimmote well and truly was a gimmick and a misstep, what that meant to me as a gamer. I thought it would provide a bridge between console shooters and mouse controls... the reality was arm numbing frustration. I thought it could provide interesting, fun methods of input. The reality was core functions mapped to arbitrary tiring motions with an input delay. Those people I had blindly argued against who called it a gimmick had been right all along, and I felt such a fool. I suppose the silver lining is that, with my fanboyism thoroughly dead, my horizons were suddenly ripe for widening and I could start to lay a foundation of cross-platform gamer experience that would let me become a more cultured, more reasonable person. My Wii spent the last years of its life as nothing more than a Smash Bros box, and for the last three or four years has been a dust collector in my closet. The Wii U never even turned my head at the time of announcement, and the release day scooted by essentially unnoticed.
I was an early adopter of the 3DS, of course. The likes of Pokemon, Golden Sun, Advance Wars and Fire Emblem turned me into an avid handheld gamer, and currently I love it and my Vita equally. Nintendo have not yet seemed to misstep in their handheld efforts... The 3D was an alarming gimmick, but mercifully has no impact on actual gameplay or design, and thus can be ignored in favor of viewing the system as a DS 2, and indeed the 3DS is now getting into its groove. I recently picked up the new Animal Crossing. It brought back memories of the original, something I hadn't really played much, but it also brought to the forefront feelings of wanting to go back to things like Metroid Prime and Windwaker. I had a dream about finding my old Gamecube and the junk TV I had during that time, and living it all again. I woke up missing the Gamecube so much it hurt. I've not harbored particularly bad feelings towards the Wii... I've been spending this past half decade mostly not thinking about it, glossing over the initial excitement I had for it, trying my best not to harbor feelings of betrayal. But that morning, I cursed the Wii.
The Wii U... seems like it wants to go the right way again. The controller pad is an anomaly, at once a potential continuation of embracing gimmick, but also with the potential to put it aside. It isn't a wiimote, at least, and touch screen and huge square shape aside it at least has the fundamental structure of a proper game pad, with dual sticks and standard button count. In addition, the effort put into the Gamepad Pro compared to the old classic controller implies they might actually intend to put it to use. But these are tentative steps back toward a golden age, and I have every reason to believe that they are equally capable of either following through, or throwing their chance away.
So, I reservedly hold out hope that they might make a return to their pre-Wii days. The windwaker remake is something I would love to play and seems like it could be the foundation for new games done right at long last, but it will not sell me. Wii U seems to be too underpowered to keep up with Xbox and PS multi-platform games once again, but I don't mind. I'm an adult now, and I can afford to have a Wii U for Nintendo games and a PS4 for everything else. For now, I wait to see if they really can return to their roots, and not SOLELY via remakes of GC games. I really hope they can, and above all I hope it's what they want and intend to do.
