Nintendo

Apart from 10 minutes with my newly downloaded Puzzle Quest I didn’t get the chance to play any games during an extremely busy weekend in which we had an important family occasion. 

What I’d like to do in this entry then is expand on something I touched on briefly earlier – Nintendo.

 

Reams have been written about the performance to Nintendo this gen and they just can’t be criticized from a business point of view (they are a business after all) with two huge profit making games machines and insanely well selling new franchises like Nintendogs, Brain Training and Wii Fit.

 

Why then is this the first generation since the NES that I, and many people like me who regard themselves as “core gamers”, haven’t owned a Nintendo home console? For me, my patience with Nintendo had been wearing thin for a long time.  I first got into console gaming with the Gameboy Original and SNES.  For someone who had been reared playing the Spectrum, Nintendo’s games and characters were a huge leap forward that blew me away.  Towards the end of the Gamecube lifecycle however, rehashes, poor support and games that just didn’t interest me were the beginning of the end.  Generally speaking all Nintendo games tend to have the same sorts of family friendly themes and characters and although mostly fun I wanted something different. Looking back I am so glad I bought a 360 instead of a Wii. Xbox Live has opened up a whole set of new experiences, mostly good, some bad.  For me though that’s what games should be about, new experiences.

Ironically the only thing that interests me about the Wii is the virtual console.