Perhaps the saddest thing I have seen in gaming since the death of Sega consoles, or the Atari 7200 would have to be the release of the Wii U.
This console was pushed out months earlier than should have been allowed. Perhaps the marketing geniuses at Nintendo thought name brand alone would give the U the edge it needed to get ahead of the game. They thought wrong.
In trying to create something as revolutionary as the original Wii, the forgot the proper way to market and provide for a new console. With only a handful of games at launch, and still very few months later, the Wii U has no Halo or God of War to lean on. Sure, Mario is always fun, but the rest of the U’s release titles are simply half-assed re-hashes of games that are probably much more fun to play on other consoles.
The biggest disappointment is the Virtual Console titles and downloadable games. With a touch screen format comparable to the DS, Nintendo had a built in library to choose from that would have been marketed to a whole new audience. There are people who simply play only consoles, and never touch portables. That makes hundreds of titles that would most likely have been easy to port and make money from, without having to continue through the entire development process all over again. The DS is a quantifiable entity, and one that has the dual screen/touch screen mastered by this point.
Perhaps the Wii U will come into its own in the next few months, but we will have to wait to see if Nintendo can recover from a rushed and lackluster release.
About the author: B.O.B. Regularly contributes to WeHateVideoGames.com, a gaming humor site where he says dirty words and tells bad jokes.
