The Nintendo Lineage 7: Wii
Part 7: The Trendy White Box
I was still young at the time but I have very vivid memories of the Wii craze; this console was like the Bubonic Plague! Everyone got it, every family and bloodline felt the touch of the Nintendo Wii and everyone had an opinion on it. I remember going on holiday to a caravan and camping site and even a member of staff offered to bring some beer for my parents in exchange for a go on Red Steel; remember that game? I bet you’ve not thought about that one in at least 15 years.
So was the Wii worth the hype? Or was it a shovelware machine? Let’s take a look.
Hardware: ** 2 Stars
From a hardware standpoint, the Nintendo Wii is critically deficient in several areas, the most being in the hardware’s power and capabilities.
Famously, the Nintendo Wii’s graphical power is more or less identical to the Gamecube; it does have a better CPU and RAM: the brain and short term memory of the machine, which generally lead to shorter loading times and more complex games but the improvement really isn’t enough to constitute a generational leap. The Nintendo Wii has only about 20MB more RAM than the original Xbox, clocking in at 88MB whereas the Xbox 360 has a whopping 512MB of RAM. I don’t like to spew technobabble but I think the raw numbers difference here speaks for itself. The Wii was a less capable console than the original Xbox, let alone its successor.
Another area the Wii was really crippled in was its controller and peripherals. Now, I will say that I find the Wiimote and Nunchuk generally more comfortable to use than detached Joy-Cons but the inconsistent compatibility, bizarre connection methods and general faff of using the many different Wii peripherals was just too much. You couldn’t navigate the menus with the Gamecube controller despite it having a port on the console itself and many games supporting it, some Wii controllers needed to be plugged into the bottom of the Wiimote, which would dangle flaccidly from the bottom while you played like a big counterweight and despite the console having internal storage, you still had to use a Gamecube memory card while using the console’s backwards compatibility, why. Nintendo?
One last thing I’d like to mention is the setup of the Wii, because if you do it wrong it can absolutely destroy your experience. The Wii Sensor Bar, should be placed on top of your TV with as high sensitivity as possible. Ours was set up in a sub-par way so as a kid, I just assumed the console didn’t work and I hated it.
The Wii is aesthetically pleasing, they managed to do a lot with the limited power available and the novelty of the Wiimote and other control methods sometimes added to the fun of playing but by 2010 this console was a bad joke with no HDMI support, a particularly muddy video output, rudimentary online features and games that looked a decade old already, so for that reason it has been given this score.
Software: **** 4 Stars
The Wii library is a bit of a love it or hate it situation for a lot of people but I’m going with my gut and my personal taste and putting it at the higher end of the spectrum.
While it is true that lots of shovelware was made for this thing, you can say the same about the PlayStation 1 and PlayStation 2 and despite this abundance of crap, the highs of the Wii library were higher than those of the Gamecube and considering the Wii sold much, much better than the ‘cube and was fully backwards compatible with that console, it’s really not difficult to see which of these consoles gives you more bang for your buck.
I’ve mentioned before that the ‘Holy Trinity’ of Nintendo: Zelda, Mario and Metroid need to be in balance to make the first party line-up truly great and the Wii absolutely achieves that. Twilight Princess was a return to form over the offensively mediocre Wind Waker, Super Mario Galaxy 1 and 2 blow Sunshine out of the water and while Metroid Prime 3: Corruption is the worst of the trilogy, it’s still an 7/10 game in a trilogy with 2 masterpieces, so i think we can cut it some slack. More than this, the Wii had lashings of great games for the smaller Nintendo franchises like Kirby and the Pokémon spin offs continued to build upon their Gamecube predecessors. The Wii is also home to some really fun ports from the other consoles and despite the Wii’s pitiful power, many fans swear by its version of Dead Rising and Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands as the best versions of those games; I also have a soft spot for playing shooters like Call of Duty on the Wii, the pointer controls feel as close as we could get to using a mouse.
I would have awarded the Wii a full 5 stars but I think many of its best games fell under the radar for non-Nintendo fans and by 2009-ish, the games just looked dated, sort of like the Nintendo Switch does at the moment but even worse.
Impact: ** 2 Stars
There’s no getting around it… the Wii was a fad.
I was an Xbox 360 man back in the great console war of the late 2000’s; I’d owned all 3 at some point but to this day, the 360 is my firm favourite of its generation. From about 2006-2009 it seemed like the Wii was everywhere but as the years rolled by, it kind of became a bad joke; the Wii was the console your mum and dad bought because they thought the stupid plastic board and Wii Sports could outpace their poor diets and lack of willpower, it was the console your little cousins had, or that the staff bought for school common rooms because it was absolutely impossible for non-gamers to fathom a Wii game with a PEGI above 7+. The PS3 was Nathan Drake, the Helghast, sleek UI, Blu-Ray and glossy black, the Xbox 360 was a column that radiated with green energy, it was the Master Chief, Marcus Phoenix and Call of Duty lobbies with the boys… the Wii was sports, family fun and profoundly uncool.
The Wii may have sold more than the competition but I often wonder how many Wii consoles were impulse bought and never used again; how many people bought a Wii and only owned Wii Sports? I can’t tell you how many people I knew in school who had the Wii as a living room console, it was the thing they got dragged to play when they had guests and couldn’t sit upstairs on Halo 3.
The Wii is cherished by a very specific kind of gamer: my generation. Born around the turn of the century we were young enough to be dazzled and impressed by the Wii’s gimmicks and not cynical or critical enough to pit it against our other consoles, or the ones our older siblings preferred.
Sentiment: **** 4 Stars
My opinion on the Wii isn’t a million miles off my opinion on the Nintendo 64: it’s a terrible video game console woefully underequipped for the competition, spat out into a market that regarded it as a bit childish and old-hat, I can see all its flaws and am happy to berate it for them and yet… I love playing this thing. I will say though, it took me many years to come to this opinion on the console.
When I first played it as a kid, I, like I’m sure many others were, had been amazed by the motion controls and the fantastic Wii Sports: unironically one of the greatest video games ever made in my opinion. That was where my liking for the Wii ended at the time. Every now and then we’d buy a Sonic game for the Wii or something else and after about 20 minutes of playing I’d get tired of the controls and the inherent awkwardness of sitting in the living room playing video games on my parents’ TV. Eventually, we sold the console and I kind of joined the bandwagon of laughing at the Wii for years thereon.
But then 2022 comes around, I find out about a load of great Wii games I missed, realise how cheap the console has become and scoop one up, from then on? My opinion on this thing did a big 180 degree turn. If you remove the Wii from comparisons to its competition and the new standards for power and connectivity that come with the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 then it’s a really nice gaming experience but I understand and agree that removing the Wii from the context of its time is also poor practice from a critical standpoint.
The Wii’s other biggest problem besides the hardware is that there is too much room for user error; ironically, in their bid to capture the casual market, Nintendo made a console where it’s very easy to mess up the basic setup, looking back, I know my household did this and I have to imagine many others did too.
To summarise? I really enjoy the Wii but I think it’s a hard sell today and if anybody asks which console of its generation they should buy, the Wii is always going to be the lowest on my list.
Final Score: 12/20
We’re on the home stretch now: just the 2 generations of Nintendo DS and the Wii-U to go; I won’t be reviewing the Nintendo Switch in this series as it hasn’t yet been discontinued.
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Man, this takes me back. The Wii was the first time I pre-ordered a game system. If I'm not mistaken, this was also the first time I noticed the pre-ordering frenzy for Nintendo hardware. Everybody wanted this thing, and it was challenging to get a guaranteed pre-order.
I specifically remember GameStop having limited slots available, and an employee I had a good rapport with agreed to put my name on the list once pre-orders officially opened while I was at work (for fear I wouldn't be able to call it in before others snatched them up)
I loved the Wii. And sure, I had the Xbox 360 and PS3 as well. The X360 is a sore subject for me because it red-ringed on me in August 2008, and Microsoft didn't want to cover the cost of shipping it to them. I know it sounds dumb not to pay the fee, but I was between jobs then and couldn't afford extra expenses that weren't food.
But the Wii never failed me. I had so much fun with it. I loved me some Wii Sports and Wii Fit. Ironically, while great for some games, the motion controls ultimately kept me away from games like Twilight Princess.
Even so, I think Nintendo succeeded in getting video games into the hands of more than just kids and young adults with the Wii. Of course, once the Wii U came out, the honeymoon was over.
Great trip down memory lane. I remember trading my GameCube for a Wii day 1. Just as you described in your article, the gimmick kind of fizzled out around 2010, but personally something saved it: modding.
I modded the shit out of my Wii, installed all emulators, burned CDs, modded Brawl (which is still an active community somehow). That really revitalized my love for the Wii.