The Wii U was unfortunately not a very successful console, but I feel that it had plenty of power to make fantastic looking games and great experiences. It came out in a weird time for technology and Nintendo always uses slightly older hardware.
As a homebrew device it is amazing. There are still exploits being found with a new, safe, simple method out now thanks to some crazy dedicated modders.
There’s a whole homebrew sdk. The Wii U can also run Wii and GameCube games by reconfiguring the hardware (or some other sort of firmware voodoo). That’s three generations of video game libraries that can be explored on one console!
Always felt like it deserved more popularity, but it couldn’t compete with the ps3/4 and Xbox 360/one.
I didn't know that until this post lol. And it was released when I was 12 and actually into gaming. Now I find it weird that the "controller" is so weak that it can't do anything but stream from the console, it kind of make the portability useless.
Main thing I used mine for was continuing to play a game when someone else wanted the TV; I could just switch to "display on controller" and keep going. Not such a big deal these days but back then it was pretty nice!
Asynchronous game design is something that holds a lot of promise. Traditionally, that was something reserved for online multiplayer in PC games. But suddenly it was possible to design local coop around one player interacting with the game in a different way than the others. The idea is still really cool, but I think most devs are unwilling to experiment with such a niche product.
Zelda four swords adventures managed that on the cube already. Not quite suddenly, I'd say. Awesome game if you had 3 friends and the necessary hardware.
The idea was to have two different screens displaying different information and there would be interactions between the two. Like the Nintendo DS's two screens. I played a tech demo(?) at the store where you'd aim a bow and arrow with the Gamepad at a target that was on the TV.
The idea didn't really end up panning out for most games.
Critically, it could stream something different than what the console was rendering to the TV. At the time it seemed Nintendo was hoping for the kind of design explosion the DS had early in its life, and a few titles trying such things were really good, but for many reasons it didn't stick the way the DS did.
> Always felt like it deserved more popularity, but it couldn’t compete with the ps3/4 and Xbox 360/one.
The Wii U marketing was a total disaster. Using the same name as a well established, casual platform, with a tiny suffix + pushing the "same gamepad compatibility" makes this hardware looks like an expensive "revised" version.
I can't understand how Nintendo didn't catch on this.
The number of people who say 'I thought the Wii U was a handheld?', made me realise how badly they messed up. Home console buyers didn't realise it was a console. Handheld buyers realised quickly it wasn't a handheld.
This is a bit of a meme, but it isn't generally true. The Nintendo 64 and GameCube were pretty cutting edge in their day. At the time the Nintendo Switch released, the Tegra X1 was still about as cutting edge as mobile GPUs came (in early 2016).
What Nintendo is about - to a fault, some would argue - is cost cutting. Sometimes that means they use older stuff, but using older stuff isn't always the best cost cutting balance to strike. The article even notes this:
> To be fair, it’s known that Nintendo’s choices are not always based on ‘cutting-edginess’ but on cost and supply.
Hang on there. I think the more accurate sentiment is "Nintendo hardware has lackluster graphics".
Switch is as much a console as it is a mobile device. Compared to an XBox, a Switch is a few horses short of a full stable.
Even the blockbuster Wii could only do 480p while contemporaries were doing HD.
What Nintendo does well is make the tradeoff worth it. Both the Wii and Switch make up for their reduced graphics by pioneering new ways of thinking about console gaming.
Well it's about perspective I guess. I understand the expectations for a home console, but especially between 2016 and 2019 Digital Foundry kept gushing about what kind of graphics the Switch enabled specifically on a handheld. Handheld gaming is not necessarily my preferred mode either, but I don't think the generalizations about Nintendo are fair - neither that their hardware is old, nor that their graphics are lackluster. For the Wii and Wii U both things are true, but for the GameCube and Switch I just don't think that's a fair thing to say.
The one generalization that is maybe fair is that Nintendo's design goals don't seem to satisfy all of the desires of enthusiast gamers, and are not aiming to satisfy them.
The gamecube is 20 years old though and ever since then they've had the weakest hardware. I remember buying a Wii the month it released and being pretty disappointed at how bad the graphics looked.
The Switch's mobile chipset was basically as bleeding edge as you could buy at the time. But it was a mobile chipset, so couldn't compete with a PS4 or Xbox.
The main problem is that even if it was cutting edge at the time, they can't or won't upgrade it. Of course iPads, which do upgrade their SoC every year, aren't as good at playing games.
You are right to say that they are actually using modern technology and sometimes even cutting-edge technology, but that does not mean that it is not inadequate technology.
The meme is about "Nintendo consoles have outdated technical capabilities and the games look like shit", and that is accurate.
Switch is not competing with PS/Xbox, but with mobile phones, tablets and portable consoles (including Nintendo's DS line). It's not underpowered for a battery powered game machine and has a standardised controller setup and easy docking as differentiators to other mobile devices.
Unless you like JRPGs, in which case the Switch is a first-class console.
Except for a few AAA-scale action RPGs that launch on PS4/5 (e.g. FF7R, upcoming FF16), the vast majority of JRPGs being released today come to Switch first. And when Switch exclusivity expires, many of them only get a PC release beyond that with PS4/5 and XB1/XSX releases simply never happening.
For a good chunk of JRPG players, the question is "PS5 or Switch?". And if you're like me and specifically prefer turn-based JRPGs, you can forget about anything that launches as a Sony exclusive so that leaves the Switch as your #1 console.
Though I guess the comparison to the DS works well here, as the DS was to platformers during its heyday what the Switch is to JRPGs now.
The DS was also to JRPGs what the Switch is to them now! Contact, Dragon Quest IX, TWEWY, Strange Journey, Rune Factory - median and top 10 beats both the PSP and PS3.
There were some good JRPGs for the DS, but it was nowhere near as dominant as the Switch is now..
The PSP was a pretty strong contender, since it had the 2.5D Trails games, FF7 Crisis Core, and some of the best remakes of FF4, FFT, and Tactics Ogre.
And PS3 got a lot of then-exclusives in mid-budget franchises that would be Switch games if they launched now, such as multiple Atelier trilogies and the first half of Trails of Cold Steel (and in fact they've all been ported to Switch). By comparison, current Atelier games now launch simultaneously on Switch and PS4 with PC ports following soon after, and the much-delayed English localizations of Trails now get cross-platform releases (Switch/PC/PS4 simultaneously).
There was never a point during the DS's lifetime where you could say "except for a tiny handful of AAA-scale PS3 exclusives, every JRPG either got simultaneous DS/PS3 releases or was a DS exclusive", but it is the case that right now you can say "except for a tiny handful of AAA-scale PS4/5 exclusives, every JRPG either gets a simultaneous Switch/PS4 release or is a Switch exclusive". I'll also add that we're in a PC renaissance too; JRPGs on PC were virtually nonexistent during the PS3 and DS's heyday (unless you spoke enough Japanese to play unlocalized Falcom games), but now pretty much every JRPG that isn't a first-party Nintendo game gets a PC port, with even the timed Switch exclusives coming to PC after a few months to a year.
I bought a Switch the other week (OLED version, but same powered hardware I guess?) and am playing BotW just now. Two things that create some lag I've noticed: the forest area with the master sword, and when blowing up lots of explosive crates.
Breath of the Wild is quite terrible on the Wii U. You get frame stutters when there’s more content on screen than just a few enemies and the resolution + aliasing are really hard on the eyes. Load times as well are longer.
I stopped playing on Wii U and rebought it for the Switch where it’s significantly better.
It came out in a weird time for technology and Nintendo always uses slightly older hardware.
I had a Playstation 2 and 3 before, but since we became parents, we wanted something family-friendly. We seriously considered a Wii U, but were totally put of by the Wii U controller, which seemed clunky, annoying, and expensive to replace in case it breaks. It was the primary reason we went for the XBox One that generation.
We got a Switch pretty soon after it was released and love it (our daughter also has a Switch Lite).
> We seriously considered a Wii U, but were totally put off by the Wii U controller, which seemed clunky, annoying, and expensive to replace in case it breaks.
You were right on all counts. It was a pretty terrible controller. Flimsy, heavy, way too big. And it was actually impossible to replace; they never offered replacement pads for sale, you had to buy a whole new console or find someone who fried their console and wanted to sell just a pad.
I thought it was totally fine. I spent a lot of hours gaming on that thing. I did not find it too heavy and anecdotally my friends' kids didn't either.
However, I can certainly understand that it looked massive and heavy. That was my assumption as well. Bit of a marketing issue there.
annoying
It was more useless than annoying. Some games used it in slightly awkward ways, sort of like the early DS days when devs were experimenting (and being forced/encouraged by Nintendo to experiment with) new forms of control.
expensive to replace in case it breaks
It was very durable in my experience. The screen is plastic, and ultimately I'd say it's just about exactly as durable as a DS or 3DS... after all, Nintendo knows how to build such things.
But, once again, your assumption totally made sense. Another marketing issue.
It was the primary reason we [passed on it]
Me too. Then, a few years back, a friend gifted me one and I had a blast with it. Most of the best games wound up on the Switch though, so ultimately you did not miss out.
I do think it led to the switch concept which has been very successful for Nintendo, my friend who had a wii U thought it was great, but just wanted the tablet to have better battery life.
The problem was that albatross of a gamepad. Not only did it have garbage battery life, but its presence led Nintendo to actively make games worse just to force mechanics onto the gamepad. Anyone else remember how godawful Star Fox Zero was, for absolutely no good reason?
I really liked the Wii U pad and used it a lot. The Switch is a more fully realized version of the concept, but it has its downsides -- it's not as comfortable to hold and play for long periods, and the lack of a two-screen mode makes certain concepts less effective. Mario Maker, for instance, worked perfectly with the Wii U and feels compromised on the Switch in comparison.
The battery life was completely irrelevant to me. I just kept it plugged in.
Another example of the two-screen mode I liked was asymmetrical local multiplayer like Nintendo Land. It's not that it's impossible now, with two switches, but I haven't seen any games do it (with 4 players on a single switch, and 1 on the other).
The Wii U's model doesn't really open up that many interesting asymmetrical multiplayer game designs, compared to multiple individual devices. There's a psychological effect of everyone being in the "same space" when most people are on one screen, but mechanically most of the time you'll want the opposite of what the Wii U can do - one person can see everything but everyone else can only see some limited view (c.f. Pac-Man Vs).
With individual devices, you can make a game where N people see something different, or N-1 people see the same thing and 1 sees something different, or where N people see the same thing (and maybe also something different, c.f. the Four Swords GBAs+GC model).
With the Wii U, you can make a game where everyone sees the same thing, or N-1 people see the same thing and 1 person sees that and something else. Even if you try to make the 1 person see something disjoint, it's too easy to cheat. And if you try to make everyone but one person see their own thing - too bad.
I always wondered why they never built something to render simple (or even complex, it can't be that costly) scenes out to multiple connected (3)DSs - relatively everyone with a Wii U must have had at least one...
Smash Bros. for Wii U let you use a 3DS as a controller. It was awkward - you had to download the “Smash Controller” app onto the 3DS from the eShop - and didn’t have any kind of video streaming, but the connectivity was there at least.
Breath of the Wild development started on the WiiU and I'm convinced it would have been better if they didn't have to shoe-horn in Switch support. The inventory menu of BOTW is horrible and totally was meant to be used real time on the gamepad.
I always thought that the name was the cause. I don't follow Nintendo very closely so when I heard about the Wii U I just assumed it was a slightly enhanced Wii, not a separate console.
I always found it pretty funny that the system's best game, Zelda: BoTW, features a tablet carried by the protagonist prominently in the game, but the game makes ZERO usage of the gamepad. This was likely a last minute change due to the decision to also make it a launch game for the Switch, and they didn't want people to say "the Wii U is better because you can manage your items on the game pad more easily".
It felt like they were pressured into putting out a new machine due to the extremely rapid decline in Wii console/game sales in 2009/2010 and had no choice but to go with the thing they were deepest into R&D with.
Thing felt like a failure the moment it was announced. Doubly so when its second E3 felt like a second attempt at the initial announce and still didn't do much to clarify what it had going for it. Triply so once you realised how limited it was.
That it took several years for games willing to engage with the platform enough to be capable of being as big of a mess as Star Fox Zero was seems like a bigger flag of its issues than the game sucking tbh. Just not an enticing format at all.
The parent comment isn't wrong, but it's referring to piracy. The Wii U has been blown wide open such that tools exist that allow you to pirate games by downloading them directly from Nintendo's servers, essentially giving you free eShop downloads. Every game that's available for the Wii U digitally, is available for a pirated download. Straight from Nintendo.
To be fair this has happened to other consoles like the ps vita. It’s possible to download the games from the online stores. The games can’t run because they’re signed, so it’s a simple http request to start the download.
Except the cryptography and security has been bypassed. So the consoles have a homebrew app that lets you download and install to console and pirate the game. All done on the console.
The Wii U was the first Nintendo console that I had no "must have" game at launch. Gamecube had Melee, Wii had Twilight Princess, Switch had Breath of the Wild. But there was nothing on the Wii U for a whole year until Pikmin 3 and Super Mario 3D World. It squandered their one year head start.
I just think that without the draw of the motion controllers, the Wii U screen just really wasn't good enough to make the console worth using. The Nintendo switch was brilliant, you just had to think like a 13 year old to understand why that was always going to sell like gangbusters.
The games library was just too weak honestly, I think that was the main thing. The software problems were in large part caused by Nintendo under-speccing its machines catching up to it. Multiplatform's were particularly adversely affected.
All in all you were better off buying a PS4 honestly.
For me, the only use was buying one for cheap right after the Switch came out. Everybody and heir mother was getting rid of their games, so everything could be had for cheap (Nintendo cheap).
Can you point me to more information about the GameCube part? Speaking as an owner of an almost broken down GC with a large library, and a very functional Wii U with a smaller one.
Breath of the Wild was originally intended to be a Wii U exclusive, with a 2015 release date[1], but it didn't end up that way. The developers had some Wii U Gamepad features in early prototypes but found that looking between the gamepad and TV was distracting and axed them.
I feel pretty confident the Sheika slate was designed around the Wii U tablet and they only cut that aspect of the game to make the Nintendo Switch version look just as good as the Wii U version.
If a Nintendo employee claimed it was to avoid distraction I'm pretty confident they are lying.
>"In doing our testing without the touch features we noticed looking back and forth between the Gamepad and the screen actually took a little something away from this type of Zelda game," he said.
>"There was no hesitation or reluctance in removing those features because we felt the way it is now is the best way to play the game," he added.
I can understand the cynicism, but, to me anyway, I agree that it's not ideal gameplay. The game pad was a big miss for me for anything other than being able to play a game when my husband was using the TV. I ended up kinda hating the gamepad.
Windwaker HD and Twilight Princess HD both let you have the map on the tablet while you play, and while I haven't tried it myself I'm told it's better than switching from one screen view to another.
On the Wii U only the tablet has motion controls, the pro controller does not, so at a minimum the game was designed to have you hold a tablet and make motions with it while Link holds his tablet and acts out that motion.
I played Windwaker HD and Pikman 3, which also put the map on the Gamepad. I didn't like the map being on a different screen at all! In practice it ends up being such an obnoxious gimmick. (To me)
I don't want to dispute your experience, just add that in my experience, the game pad was perfect* for Batman: Arkham City. You would look down at it in the same situations where Batman would look down at his gadgets. So even though the game pad wouldn't work well for every game or every person, I think it had undeniable inherent benefits in some situations.
* They bungled the audio aspect, though. If you played with headphones, you couldn't route game pad audio through them.
I still have my Wii U plugged in and while that may be true, they made up for it by never charging for online service. No-charge access to Mario Kart 8 multiplayer has been great.
The Wii U had a rich feature set. Firsts for a Nintendo home console:
- OTB web browser
- OTB audio and video chat with friends, native support for 3rd party headsets
- real-time direct messaging (via Miiverse) notifications and other friend notifications via the home button LED
- Ability to view online status of friends
- High definition graphics
- 5+ player synchronous local multiplayer
- built-in Nintendo TVii service
- built-in support to use the gamepad as a TV remote
- eShop selections for mobile retro consoles (e.g. GBA, DS)
- background installations and updates
- accelerometer, gyroscope, front-facing camera, touch screen, IR sensor, NFC all packed into the gamepad
- full backwards compatibility with a prior console (Wii)
Not to mention, all online services were free to use. And those still existing, are still free.
Edit: As a kid, this was the first console that had just enough 3rd party support for me to enjoy games like Fifa, Need for Speed, and Call of Duty akin to an Xbox 360, while also hosting all my favorite Nintendo games. It was a fun system, even if it was poorly advertised and a bit awkward. But I enjoyed the gimmicks and I still use it, mostly for playing exclusives that never made it to the Switch.
Yes, the Wii contained full GameCube components inside, so it was able to natively play GameCube games. I think the later Wii Mini model removed that capability, but the regular Wii model was backwards compatible.
Yes, ours had that. There was a door on the top that concealed four GameCube controller ports and two memory slots. We never had a GameCube but I ended up buying some controllers and GC games to play on the Wii.
There was a model before the Wii Mini that also dropped GameCube support. It looks similar to the original model but lacks the GameCube ports and the "Wii" logo is placed for horizontal orientation instead of vertical. It's sometimes called the "family edition".
The Wii Mini originally released in Canada but came to other regions later. Japan never got the GameCube-less models for some reason.
The article mentions that the Wii U had gamecube compatibility. I wonder how that was achieved? And I'm guessing it can't take the small optical disks of the gamecube.
The Wii plays GameCube games and accepts the controllers and memory cards, the Wii U doesn't. I assume removing the ports and the mechanism to load small discs in the disc slot were the main reasons for dropping it.
The Wii was compatible with the GameCube largely by being basically an enhanced GameCube under the hood, and the Wii U is kind of a further step down that same road with its "vWii" backwards compatibility mode, so it's possible to use homebrew to play dumped GameCube games on a Wii U natively, only providing some light glue to hook things together. It's not officially supported though.
The Wii U could play gamecube games in wii mode, but it required jailbreaking and loading the images onto storage. So, I wouldn't say it was "possible" ootb.
The Wii U was such a fun console with so many great games, it's a shame that it was relatively inaccessible due to horribly bodged marketing and weird choices - luckily they're porting most(but not all) of the gems. I actually think that the gamepad screen did contribute a lot to a lot of games, especially if there was a lot of action and you were able to use it as a map/for quick actions.
It's good that they basically built a product that was impossible to market badly with the switch, it probably sells itself, considering the form factor and all of the first and third party support they have now.
Nintendo Land was great for the asymmetrical multiplayer. Four players co-op on the big screen versus a fifth player on the GamePad. It's not impossible to do in other ways, but I haven't seen it done.
I think shared/split screen on the TV adds an additional social element to it. Otherwise it's just all of us playing on their phones/Switch.
Mario Maker used the touchscreen effectively. You could seamlessly go back and forth between editing your level on the touchscreen and testing it on your TV. I also liked the touchscreen effects in Super Mario 3D World and regret their (effective) absence in the Switch port.
Wonderful 101 does it beautifully, entire game was designed to use it in many different ways.
The best overall use is the Nintendo DS emulator. Unfortunately only few games are available for purchase but with a bit of hacking the compatibility is great.
Yes, really innovative use of the gamepad for ZombiU gave the game a properly scary aspect when checking in bags and boxes, and nervously looking up at the screen as you're doing it.
In Tokyo Mirage Session you get text messages from the characters on the second screen so it's like you are glancing at your cell phone as you play. This worked very poorly when they ported it to Switch and you had to go into a menu when a party member texts you.
I felt like later in the Wii U's life, they were pushing it more as being for off-TV play, and that meant that that kind of stuff would have to be implemented anyway— Wind Waker HD certainly had the dual approach, where the default was to play on the TV with inventory on the gamepad, but if you played in off-TV mode, then the inventory was a pause menu popup. That extra development work to support both was probably invisible to most users who only ever played on-TV.
That combined with the increasing inevitability that everything was going to be ported to a later, single-screen system anyway, and it's not hard to see why titles like Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze and Zelda BOTW didn't use the secondary screen at all.
My reason to buy a Wii U back then was that whenever I found the time to play a video game, I had to go through a session of Windows Update, Steam update and game update that I lost interest by the time it was ready.
Compare that to the Wii U back then: Turn on and play.
Nintendo even achieved to keep this mindset with the Switch: It will update in the background so usually you just turn it on and play.
> Nintendo even achieved to keep this mindset with the Switch: It will update in the background so usually you just turn it on and play.
I don't agree. I play my switch maybe once every couple of weeks, and almost without fail there's a system or game update that it asks me to install.
Granted, _most_ updates can be put off for a while by hitting "update later", but I see very little difference between the consoles (and PCs) in terms of update behaviour these days, for better or worse.
Sleep mode. And consoles are way better at respecting your choice not to update both in regards to games and the OS. I can put the Switch to sleep and leave the game there for a week or a month and then come back exactly where I was.
With Wii U games rarely received patches, everything was on the disc and ran off it too.
That is happening for me only with games I didn't use recently.
However, we used play Fortnite quite often on both the Switch and the PS4. On the Switch it was ready immediately in most cases. If not, the update loaded and was installed rather quickly.
Compare that to the PS4: It's updated in about 50% of the cases. If not, downloading takes very long and then it is applying the update so slow, that we usually just give up.
I got a steam deck - it makes a very decent attempt at transforming the former experience into the latter, but keeping access to all your existing PC games.
How well does it succeed? One reason I've only played games on consoles is that if I see a game that has PS5 on the box, I know it will run on my console. Do Steam games make a similar promise for the Steam Deck?
Re: Sleep - Compared a traditional console, the Steam Deck does not auto-download updates quietly in the background while its asleep/docked. That is my one gripe with it. You need to have the screen on and active for it to start downloading games.
On top of that, the default behavior is to stop downloads while playing a game. You can change this in the settings, but at a significant performance hit.
Re: The 'just works' - In handheld mode, all Steam Verified titles have 'just worked' for me. Docked mode is a different story, because no game has automatically switched resolution automatically. You need to set the Native resolution mode on a per-game basis.
Additionally, there is always a chance that an unverified game you're looking for will not work very well on the Steam Deck - be it control-wise, graphically, or some other reason. It is not as 'plug and play' as a traditional console, but the device continues to get better over time with updates.
If a game works on Proton (http://protondb.com/), it will almost certainly run on the Steam Deck. And the Steam Deck UI does a pretty good job of highlighting games that run well on the Deck and telling you what the compatibility issues are, if anything.
Assuming the game itself runs fine, usually the main issue is mapping steam deck controls to the in-game keyboard and mouse config. I find the UX for doing this to be pretty confusing and terrible (doubly so when using an external controller), but this is helped some by the fact that you can apply controller mappings submitted by other Steam users.
Way back when I had a Playstation 3 it would update in the background but only if you paid for the subscription, otherwise, every time you turned it on, you had to wait for the updates to download to play a game, if the game had updates. This model for updates just rankled me so much I stopped buying Playstation, every time I turned it on, it had to download updates and I would forget why I had turned it on by the time I got back to it.
Huh. I had the complete opposite experience. My girlfriend and I used to joke that the U in Wii U stands for "update". Maybe it's just because we didn't play it frequently.
I reckon Nintendo has the best strategy almost game consoles. Not focusing on the power/realism and instead of other aspects.
At some point, if someone buys a ps5 or xbox for power only. Then they just get a pc, those consoles takes years to design. By the time they're released, it's already outdated
> At some point, if someone buys a ps5 or xbox for power only. Then they just get a pc, those consoles takes years to design. By the time they're released, it's already outdated
I don't think that's really true. Hardware moves slowly enough nowadays that really good hardware from a couple of years ago is still very competitive with today's hardware. And if you tried to build a PC with comparable specs to, say xbox series x, you'd be paying a very substantially larger amount because MS have economies of scale and a strong negotiating position.
I always saw it as: Sony and Microsoft seem to aim to be the "premium" gaming/set-top-box experience for pro-sumers and hardcore gamers.
Nintendo, on the other hand, tries to appeal to a much broader market. They learned from their success in the 80s, when pretty much every North American living room with kids in the household had an NES and a stack of games on top of the TV. Nintendo sees themselves as friendlier to casual gamers and families. They want to the "the safe choice" when grandma or grandpa whip out their checkbook at Walmart to buy a gaming system for their grandchildren.
Just being family-friendly doesn't quite guarantee success, which is why they've always been exploring new ways to interact with video games. Basically every new console they've introduced has had controllers markedly different from what came before. (Even if it turns out they were not necessarily _better_ than what came before.) In the case of the Wiimote, they pretty much hit a home run. It was not only a novel input method, it turned out to be loads of fun for casual gaming, social gatherings, and families.
Not the main reason, game studios target consoles because of established player base.
Actually, consoles are tricky to develops on because they are quiet restricted from hardware standpoint, so you have to invest a lot in hardware knowledge.
In the current day that won't really affect gaming. As long as the PC is stable being its own snowflake hardware combo, the developer of a game doesn't have to worry about customizing code around it. Most games are built on engines like Unity, not that direct API access wouldn't be just as reliable. Games built on very well-tested platform like Unity just remove all remaining doubt.
Slightly OT but Wii U games seem to be a topic here: There were many great games, but the IMHO single best game on this console was Lego City Undercover.
It was like a less violent GTA. Such a joy to play, plenty of jokes, fantastic open world and great story mode with funny missions.
Luckily they ported it to other consoles too. My kids are still playing it with their friends.
I loved and still do love my Wii U and still use it semi regularly to this day. There was something about the Wii and Wii U that was lost on the Switch. They just had that special Nintendo "feel" and vibe
IMO it's because Switch adopted the great XMBC UI. That's probably why. Wii's channels for me (and I feel most based on how I saw others use their Wii) were useless...
Another badly designed Nintendo console. Now hear me out:
NES: Well designed.
SNES: Well designed.
N64: Hampered by the originally 12-24 MB cartridges as opposed to 650 MB CDs.
GameCube: Well designed. A little hampered by the 1.4 GB mini DVDs as opposed to 7.8 GB DVDs.
Wii: Underpowered, but a surprise smash hit capturing that era’s sensibilities (like the PS2).
Wii U: Clunky and awkward, which however led to the Switch.
Switch: Well designed.
GB: Well designed.
GBC: Well designed.
GBA: Well designed, however with a very bad audio quality as compared to the SNES.
NDS: Well designed, again with very bad audio quality, and a surprise smash hit capturing that era’s sensibilities (like the PS2).
3DS: Hampered by its pitiful 2004 era 200 MHz CPU and 240p display. Clunky and unremarkable, which had a success in its second half of existence because people just want Nintendo games.
Switch: Well designed.
You’re missing the whole story here. Was the Game Boy well designed? It was a smash hit upon release, but everybody immediately complained about the screen quality. The thing sold and sold and sold because it was inexpensive and just plain fun, bad screen notwithstanding. By 1996 however, it was woefully old, and the Game Boy Pocket sales were soft when it came out. Pokémon saved Nintendo’s bacon and gave them leeway to develop the Game Boy Color, which was also old and criticized upon release, but it again had Pokémon.
It’s more complicated than a simple good or bad checkmark whether a thing is popular or not.
I would call the original Game Boy well-designed but put the GBC in the same "Underpowered, but a surprise smash hit capturing that era’s sensibilities" category as the Wii.
With the tech at the time, the Game Boy wasn't going to have a better screen without seriously compromising battery life. Case in point, the Sega Game Gear which was graphically way better than the Game Boy but died fast if you took it off the wall plug.
The GBC didn't have the same excuse; it was so many years newer, and it offered very little over the Game Boy other than a color screen. And its color screen still looked like a joke next to a Game Gear. Given how much newer the GBC was than the GG, I doubt Nintendo couldn't have made a handheld with Game Gear-quality graphics but without the awful battery life.
But it doesn't matter, because the GBC had an awesome games library and people loved it.
It was the pragmatic choice at the time: the screen was reflective and featured four colors (really, shades of grey), but that was enough to allow the system to run for several hours on four AA batteries. It's closest competition, the Game Gear, featured a backlit color LCD, but it ran through its six AA batteries in an hour or two at most. There were other also-ran handhelds in that era (Wonderswan, Neo Geo Pocket), but the Game Boy was by far the most dominant system of that era. Nintendo didn't face any substantial competition until 2004/2005 with the PlayStation Portable, and even Sony didn't do all that well with its two portable units (the PSP sold okay but game sales dropped off once the system was hacked, the Vita was a dismal failure in both hardware and game sales).
The Atari Lynx was the other one that came to mind. I agree with you, the original Gameboy was well-designed. I had one of course being over 40. It was the Nokia brick phone of handhelds. Yes, I was envious of the Game Gear, but most of the attention was on the Gameboy anyway so you could safely ignore its existence at the time. Portable anything back then was still quite the novelty. And the games on the Gameboy were fun. Tough to beat a game of Super Mario Land or Tetris.
The DS had 16 audio channels compared to the GBA's 2. Actually, the DS was able to use the built-in GBA coprocessor to process its audio. So it was leaps ahead of the GBA, though not quite to SNES standards. By the time the DSi came around, there was a built in audio processing chip as well.
I think "design" is overused in this case. Sure some users base their purchase decision on actual design/look of a console, but that's a rarity.
Success is more dictated by 4 main constraints or factors:
- Game selection and support
- Price point
- System performance (including storage)
- Innovative-ness or accessibility
Successful consoles typically met at least 3 of the above. For example the Nintendo Switch had very mediocre system performance, but it had great (1st party) game support, priced lower than competing XBox and PS4, and seemed very approachable for all demographics.
> For example the Nintendo Switch had very mediocre system performance
Nintendo Switch had the most powerful GPU of any mobile device released at its time. Furthermore it has 4 GB of RAM. Just the Cortex A-57 CPU wasn’t bleeding edge any more, having been replaced by the Cortex A-72 by the time of the Switch with a higher IPC of 16%. It was a well balanced system.
You might be mistaken because mobile CPU performance grew in an unparalleled explosive fashion, and the Cortex A-72 was already replaced by the A-73, A-74, A-75, A-76, A-77, A-78, and A-710 by now. But this is unfair to a system where its design was frozen already 6 years ago.
It just means that, if a successor Switch is built the same way, and a Cortex A-78 is used, its CPU would have ca 2.6x IPC. If it ran at twice the clock speed, its CPU performance would be 5.2x.
copetti.org's writeups about the classic consoles are really good. So copetti.org has interesting details on Nintendo's other flop - the Virtual Boy. What I found interesting about that is the VB uses moving mirrors and a vertical LED strip to generate the display - a teensy bit similar to DLP.
The Wii U was a failure in marketing and odd design choices. The former has been discussed quite well by others, so I want to focus on the design choices that didn't help its long-term success.
The console initially promoted the gimmick of being a controller for cable TV, as seen by the blue TV button the bottom of the gamepad. This was at a time when cable TV was starting to die out for the younger crowd. The original Xbox One made a similar misguided focus on controlling TV, while the overall market was making a major shift to streaming in that period.
Next, the gamepad used a resistive touchscreen instead of a capacitive one. Phones with capacitive touchscreens had been the norm for years at this point, making the Wii U touchscreen feel very low quality.
The gamepad came with too small of a battery, which limited the gamepad's use as a portable console, which was already tied down to being nearby the console itself to stream games smoothly. The battery could be easily upgraded to a larger size, but it had to be purchased and installed later on.
The base console only had 8 GB of storage. The deluxe model only came with 32 GB of storage and cost an extra $150 (for $350 total). The console largely focused on using discs for games, but the next gen of Xbox and PlayStation consoles showed that internal storage was important. The Wii U had an SD card slot, but SD cards could oddly not be used to expand game storage; USB storage could be used however.
The Wii U had some very strong game releases that eventually saw successful ports to the Switch, and it also had the best Virtual Console release of games in any console ever, that the Switch still has not matched. The value of a Wii U by the end of its life was insane. It's the only console where so many incredible games (almost all of Nintendo's catalogue through the Wii - but not the GameCube) could be played on the system. I think the console just focused on all of the wrong things in the minutia. Tie that with terrible marketing, and the console was doomed to failure. The Wii U's genius was later revised upon and proved to be a success with the Switch. Despite it's failures, the Wii U was a great console that is one of my favorites of all time (along with the PlayStation Vita).
The concept of this machine was such a mess. You can truly tell something was rotten in the org chart when a bizarre console/tablet compromise is what they actually shipped with a straight face.
Not at all. Nintendo has been making experimental toys since before anyone here was alive. They've been making experimental electronic toys for as long as there have been electronic toys.
As a homebrew device it is amazing. There are still exploits being found with a new, safe, simple method out now thanks to some crazy dedicated modders.
There’s a whole homebrew sdk. The Wii U can also run Wii and GameCube games by reconfiguring the hardware (or some other sort of firmware voodoo). That’s three generations of video game libraries that can be explored on one console!
Always felt like it deserved more popularity, but it couldn’t compete with the ps3/4 and Xbox 360/one.