Here we are at the end of the road. The last Nintendo system in my collection is the Wii. This time around, I bought many of the major titles released on the system. Metroid: Other M, Donkey Kong Country Returns, and the Super Mario Galaxy games are among the list of titles that I’ve added to my purchased.
I obtained a Wii in 2008, which was, as most of you know, a few years after the system had launched. At the time I only owned a few games. A lot of them were terrible, admittedly. But the highlights were Super Mario Galaxy and Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Brawl, like Melee, was a massive time sink for me. I used to hold small tournaments and parties focusing on the game. Despite the fact that I greatly enjoyed the title, I personally believe that it still doesn’t compare to Melee, my favorite of the series.
As I’ve stated before, my experiences with past Nintendo consoles only involved Pokemon and Mario Party. This time around, though, I decided to go forward and check out these new games that were announced at Nintendo’s E3 conference last year.
Metroid has been the most fun for me thus far. Although there were quite a few criticisms pertaining to the story and the voice acting, I had a great deal of fun with it. The gameplay is pretty solid. The only bone I have to pick with it is the times when it sticks you in the first-person point-of-view and forces you to investigate every little corner. Otherwise though, the cutscenes are awesome and the main game is enjoyable.
Donkey Kong is – in a word – is difficult. It’s one of those platformers in which very precise moves are required to progress. Anything less and you will consistently fail. A game this challenging is refreshing, especially coming from a parent company that has been making games more “casual” and upsetting its audience by doing so. While this title doesn’t have anything close to a story, it makes up for it with wonderful platforming. Sometimes it’s good to go old school.
Moving on, one of my all time favorite Wii games is Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. I am a massive Silent Hill fan and until now there weren’t any games in the series on a Nintendo console. Climax Studios built this game from ground up for the Wii, and it shows.
Shattered Memories is a re-imagining of the very first game released on the PSOne.
The development team removed many of the same themes and characters and created an excellent game around it. The motion controls were used for the flashlight and chase scenes, but the flashlight element was the better of the two features. Essentially, the controls were one-to-one with the flashlight and it worked perfectly. The graphics themselves were not too bad as well.
Overall my time with the Wii hasn’t been long compared to the other Nintendo systems. I feel as though the amount of standout titles on the Wii has been less than the previous system. I know there are titles available such as No More Heroes and Red Steel, but I decided to stick to mostly Nintendo-developed releases.
At the moment, I doubt the console will continue on for much longer. Personally, I’m alright with this. This is just my opinion, but I want Nintendo to release a new home system due the lack of features on the Wii compared to the other consoles (both of which I own). Despite how far ahead of the curve Nintendo may be, they’re also very far behind it. They need to give us a piece of hardware which continues to innovate while keeping up with other hardware manufactures.
Now that is a future I could get behind.
