There is little doubt that Nintendo was the first revolutionary console ever released. Atari and Odyssey were released prior to the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), but Nintendo is the name that stuck, mainly because of its creation of the 8-bit plumber known as Mario. The Super Nintendo (SNES) was also incredibly popular, and then Nintendo kind of hit a rough edge with the Nintendo 64 (N64). The console had competition from the Sega Genesis and the PlayStation and ended up selling an unsuccessful amount of systms in its run. However, the N64 did have many games considered extraordinary, such as The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which is still rated the #1 game of all time on some websites; Super Mario 64, Banjo Kazooie and Donkey Kong 64, which set the bar for the 3D platform genre; and Goldeneye, which really defined the first person shooter genre (while proving that the N64’s graphics was sub-par). The GameCube wasn’t really a success or a failure, but it had massive competition from Xbox and PlayStation 2, and the latter is currently the top selling home console of all time. And then with the Wii, Nintendo, at least for some time, seemed to have raised the bar yet again, with its motion controller and intuitive games. Unfortunately, they chose not to care about the graphics, keeping the video quality at 480p, below the 720p that Xbox and PS3 display. The Wii’s video game library started strong and stayed strong for about a year and a half, until Nintendo decided to stop releasing good games.
My opinion on which games are the best is going to be somewhat biased because I grew up with Nintendo, playing Super Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong Country SNES as well as the classics on the N64. I can still play all of those games today and I still find them to be just as good as they were back then, even though the graphics are clearly outdated. Regardless of my preferences on games, it’s not what I’m arguing here. I don’t know what is going through Nintendo’s head nowadays. The Nintendo Wii was released back in 2006 and had a great start, selling out in almost every store in North America. It was released with Zelda: Twilight Princess, and many other popular Nintendo games soon followed. But after April of 2008, when Mario Kart Wii was released, the number of good Nintendo games being released plummeted. I myself did not buy a new Wii game for a full two years. It was as if they’d forgotten about their fans. Mario Party 8 was pretty bad, but for some reason, they didn’t bother to create a new one, even though the series is incredibly popular among Nintendo fans. Nintendo was clearly past the point of developing new fun and interesting platformers like Banjo Kazooie or Conkur’s Bad Fur Day for the N64. Of course, the developer of both those games is Rare, who works for Microsoft nowadays. Nintendo continued releasing very poor spinoff games including characters such as Mario and Sonic, but there weren’t any big games and truly memorable games being released. One of the best releases last year, Donkey Kong Country Returns, was a sequel to a series of video games not seen since the mid-1990s. I really enjoyed the game, and I’m thankful they revisited the series, but I want some more original games, as I’m sure many older Wii owners do as well.
