Wii Infatuation

I noticed something a few days ago: I tend to disproportionately discuss the wii more than any other console, or anything else about video games. By a fair margin. Sure, there are my criticisms of Microsoft regarding the XBox and ragging on Sony for the PS3, but it got me thinking: Why am I so infatuated with this little white box?

There's one big reason: It's a good idea, and an excellent piece of hardware. Sure the game library might be a little lackluster, but it is something new There's nothing really unique about that monolithic black colossus or the breakdown machine (except possibly how often it breaks down).

Sure, when it was announced, I was cynical and skeptical. So were a lot of other people. But Nintendo managed to pull it off.

In the aftermath of the video game market crash around 1987, Nintendo wanted to design a machine that didn't look like a fancy computer. From this develpment came the 'VCR-style' Nintendo Entertainment System: a machine that didn't look like any console of the day. Neither does the Wii: it almost looks like something Apple had designed, without any of that icky fanboy nonsense¹. The advent of optical disks (as opposed to large, clunky cartridges) has done wonders for the ability of designers to make the consoles sleeker and smaller.

After thinking about it, as physically different as the Wii is from its contemporaries, that's not what matters. The Wii is able to make gaming fun again. Yatzee points this out in several episodes of Zero Punctuation... most prominently in his review of Super Paper Mario:

That's right: you have to amuse yourself while playing a game

And that's the major problem with video games today: so many of them feel like work. Tell me, why should I waste my time?

1: Yes, I know it's a joke, people: the wii fanbois are almost as bad