The Nintendo Wii is more than a decade old now; it’s been a long time since 2006, yet it feels like it all has gone by with a blink of an eye. Sometimes I wonder if today’s gamers still remember what the Wii launch meant. It’s easy nowadays in 2018 to look back at the dark days of the console when Nintendo just left it to wither away with their focus elsewhere, fans had to beg for certain games to even be released for it, and the shovelware. Oh the shovelware! If there was ever any cheap-shot to take in gaming, it would be to mention the sheer amount of shovelware that came with the Wii and dismiss the console as nothing but. However when the Wii first came out everything about it seemed to define what Nintendo would be for a time. The Miis, the new game-play mechanics (or gimmicks depending how jaded you are), great background music for apps/online shops (with awesome fan remixes), and the Virtual Console. All of these things were kept at the forefront of Nintendo’s future consoles since then with the Nintendo 3DS and eventually the failed follow-up: the Nintendo Wii U.
This changed though when Nintendo launched their new Switch console on March 3 last year and ever since then all the old Wii era branding has slowly faded away. Sure Miis are still here, and you can even transfer your old Miis over to the Switch (I know I did), but gone is the day where setting up a Mii is one of the first steps you take when turning on your brand new console straight out of the box. Mii Maker? Not here. For a time if you wanted to make yourself a Mii you would need a smart-phone, but even that has gone on to pass since Miitomo is dead now too. At least Nintendo just recently created an online website for Mii creation but the writing is definitely on the wall for these little guys.
That’s not all either, like what about the background music? There’s none. The Nintendo Switch is as silent and cold as library in the middle of a snowstorm. Where is the fun and exciting music? Where are the themes that were introduced with the Nintendo 3DS? Why are the games silent when you click on them? No longer is there an exciting voice yelling out the title of the game, or a nice little 3 second jingle playing when you select something on the OS. No, instead when I turn on the console I’m just left with cold silence, as I stare into the abyss that is the barren Switch OS until a game finally loads.
The eShop isn’t much better. The Nintendo Wii, Nintendo DSi, Nintendo 3DS, and Nintendo Wii U all had fantastic music playing while accessing their digital shops. It felt like an experience—like you just entered a Nintendo super store. Now it’s just another boring app store. Cold, hard to navigate, older stuff easily becomes lost, and so, so, so quiet! Then there is the Virtual Console. Forget not evening getting to swing the bat, the VC never even got a chance to show up to the ballpark. A whole year passed for the Nintendo Switch with nothing and finally as of May 8 we learned why: Nintendo is no longer supporting the Virtual Console. Another old staple of the Wii era dead.This changed though when Nintendo launched their new Switch console on March 3 last year and ever since then all the old Wii era branding has slowly faded away. Sure Miis are still here, and you can even transfer your old Miis over to the Switch (I know I did), but gone is the day where setting up a Mii is one of the first steps you take when turning on your brand new console straight out of the box. Mii Maker? Not here. For a time if you wanted to make yourself a Mii you would need a smart-phone, but even that has gone on to pass since Miitomo is dead now too. At least Nintendo just recently created an online website for Mii creation but the writing is definitely on the wall for these little guys.
That’s not all either, like what about the background music? There’s none. The Nintendo Switch is as silent and cold as library in the middle of a snowstorm. Where is the fun and exciting music? Where are the themes that were introduced with the Nintendo 3DS? Why are the games silent when you click on them? No longer is there an exciting voice yelling out the title of the game, or a nice little 3 second jingle playing when you select something on the OS. No, instead when I turn on the console I’m just left with cold silence, as I stare into the abyss that is the barren Switch OS until a game finally loads.
Does it sound like I’m harshing on the Nintendo Switch too much? If so, I really am sorry. I love the Switch, and my excitement for its release was palpable; I even got mine the day it came out at the midnight launch (my first and probably my only considering how awful that experience was but that’s a story for another time). Between the Nintendo Switch and my 3DS I barley played anything else last year. I put nearly 150 hours into XenoBlade Chronicles 2 alone (and I’m scared at how hight the number would be if I added Mario Odyssey and Breath of the Wild to that too. Needless to say: probably too much). But just because I love it doesn’t mean I can’t start to feel a bit disappointed at some of the console’s shortcomings. And yes, I’m sure there’s better, more reasonable shortcomings to address: like the limited hard-drive space, the short battery life, and game cartridges being so expensive leading to some shady developers only putting half a game on a cartridge and forcing large downloads on their consumers instead of just paying for bigger cartridges, but well, people are talking about that to death already. You know? And maybe it’s just my nostalgia for the simpler and easier time of time of 2006, but seeing all the old Wii stuff finally die has been a real experience for me. I wanted to talk about this.
The death of the Nintendo Wii Shop struck me hard back in March 26 of this year. It’s still around until January 2019, but only as an abandoned ghost-town. You can’t add any more points to buy anything so this is essentially just a grace period for people to redownload old stuff. Before the Wii Shop went the way of K-Marts all across the nation, though, I made sure to buy up all the great Virtual Console games I could as well as a few WiiWare titles to boot. I honestly probably spent an upwards of couple hundred dollars on this like a complete and total idiot. Was it sane to burn away a whole paycheck like that? No, no it was not. But that was just how much nostalgia I had for the console and its digital storefront. I needed the last few VC titles I really wanted and that have yet to resurface on any other digital platform, and all those WiiWare titles that aren’t anywhere but the Wii shop: I had to have them too!
You see, the Wii shop was my first ever experience for digital game purchases, and at the time was mind blowing to me. I couldn’t believe all the great stuff I could get on my Wii through the internet. Back in 2006 the Virtual Console was actually a major selling point of the entire Wii system for me. And the great hits kept coming, and coming, and coming. The support for the Wii’s VC was simply phenomenal, and I experienced some consoles for the first time through it, like the wonderful and often over looked TurboGrafx-16.You see, the Wii shop was my first ever experience for digital game purchases, and at the time was mind blowing to me. I couldn’t believe all the great stuff I could get on my Wii through the internet. Back in 2006 the Virtual Console was actually a major selling point of the entire Wii system for me. And the great hits kept coming, and coming, and coming. The support for the Wii’s VC was simply phenomenal, and I experienced some consoles for the first time through it, like the wonderful and often over looked TurboGrafx-16.
The support sadly is something that got worse and worse through the ages, however. The Nintendo 3DS VC was an exciting prospect for me since I always wanted GB and GBC games to come to the Wii VC (The GCN’s GameBoy Player spoiled me back then), so finally getting Nintendo to dig into their old backlog as well as Sega’s GameGear backlog, not to mention the 3D Classics, had me over the moon. There was a laundry list of classic GB and GBC games I just had to have on my 3DS, and things sounded great near the launch of the console’s eShop. Then sadly it took awhile for the 3DS VC to really get going, and games trickled out a lot slower than back on the Wii. We got some huge games early enough like Link’s Awakening, but some other games that should have been an easy given took years. We had to wait until 2016 to get Pokémon Red, Blue/Green, and Yellow for Arceus’ sake! And Pokémon Crystal (the one retro Pokémon I wanted to revisit the most) didn’t trickle out until 2018! The Nintendo Switch was already a year old by then. If you count all the way back to the Wii when I wanted GB support, I waited 12 years for Crystal, what the heck?!
The Nintendo Wii U’s Virtual Console was another exciting prospect at first that really just fizzled out, probably even worse than the 3DS’. I still have fond memories of coming home from some University summer courses to the Nintendo Direct that revealed Earthbound will finally get a rerelease for the first time in 18 years! Only on the Wii U Virtual Console! “Immediate purchase” I said to myself that day, and sure enough I was there day-1. And a few years later Earthbound Beginnings (aka Mother 1) came out as well for the first time … well ever. What a nice surprise, getting a previously canceled game from 1990 is what stuff like the VC is all about. And then of course Mother 3 finally — ha ha ha … if only. The two Earthbound releases were more the exception and not the norm, sadly, and things soon got pretty stagnant on the Wii U in general, even outside of the eShop and Virtual Console.
Nintendo seemed desperate for a while to give the Wii U something though and the GBA games were a nice surprise even though I have to admit it felt off getting these on a home console instead of the 3DS. Thankfully the wizs at M2 at least had some great emulations for their GBA releases so they didn’t look gross on a modern big screen TVs. Not all of the GBA games would be so lucky on the Wii U VC, though, so it can be kind of awkward every now and again when you stumble on a GBA game that just looks pretty bad on the Wii U. The Nintendo DS came later and was an even weirder add for the Wii U’s VC and honestly I’m not even sure why Nintendo did that. I’m a bit of two minds on it still. On one hand this will probably be the only system to properly emulate these games given the Wii U’s unique two screen set up, but on the other hand, should we really try to stretch out Nintendo DS games on modern big screen TVs? Even GBA games were worrying enough. Sure I wanted the Wii to play GB and GBC games back in the day, but TVs weren’t nearly as big. Nowadays the 25 inch TV I played my Wii on would be considered a child’s play thing. Well, regardless they were here, and Nintedno did manage to release quite a few DS games on the Wii U, even getting both Zelda Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks out there.
But besides some weird portable console pick-ups the Wii U’s VC was super slow and barley had much of anything release for it. Third party support wasn’t absent and there were companies like Natsume who really kept at it for a while but it was once again no where near the level of support the Wii had. I still manged to make the most of it and I’m glad rarer N64 games finally got a rerelease like Harvest Moon 64 and Ogre Battle 64 (Swearing Simulator 64), but overall, I felt I barley got a chance to use the poor thing. What better way to sum up the Wii U though? I barley got a chance to do anything on it.
When it comes to both the Nintendo 3DS and Nintendo Wii U, they were such a far cry from the Wii’s glory days when you could just cycle through the plethora of retro games for hours trying to decide what to play next. Seeing how much the Virtual Console degraded over the past 12 years is honestly kind of heart breaking, I had so much admiration and really bought into the hype when it was first launched only for it to end up like this more than a decade later. It makes sense why Nintendo decided to finally move on. It’s always sad to lose some sort of branding you really enjoyed, after all you made it a part of your life and have such found memories of it. I would surf the Wii Shop on Friday nights for hours as a teen trying to find what cool looking retro game to try out next. Between that, and Twilight Princess, my high school weekends were all set. So seeing how the VC died with such a quiet and weak whimper instead of a bang, really hits me right in my nostalgia. A part of my youth felt like it would be gone forever when the Wii Shop closure was announced. I knew it wouldn’t last forever but all the same, it was hard to finally admit it will be gone.
But then something really special happened. When it came closer and closer to Nintendo shutting down the Wii Shop I saw so many people share their memories about it. I wasn’t alone in my love! Lots of great stories from Nintendo fans got passed around and of course recommendations on what to get before it was all gone. This really put a smile on my face, 12 years later and we were all talking about the old Wii Shop just like I was a teenager again. So many passionate videos and articles resurfaced with people reminiscing about the glory days of the VC and all the fun and interesting experimental titles that used to be part of digital game stores. If Nintendo themselves would stay silent then it was up to us to be the ones to raise our voices and say the final eulogy. So yeah, maybe Nintendo will never say anything about this 12 year old branding or a digital storefront on a dead system that is two game generations old now, but us fans will keep talking about it, because whether or not anyone realized it at the time, Nintendo created an unique shopping experience we’ll never forget.
While the Wii and many of its fun branding and concepts are gone now, they will never truly be forgotten and live on in a generation of Nintendo fans. Nintendo won’t ever truly ax off the Virtual Console either. The branding is dead now, but rereleasing older game ROMs is too lucrative a business to ignore. Someday soon I’m sure we’ll see Nintendo take another swing at giving us these older games. The Switch’s eShop is already full of classic games from SNK who took it upon themselves to release their backlog, VC or not. Then we have the NES and SNES Classics, which are just such fun little toys that I really can’t get enough of. Even when I’m not playing them I just like looking at these adorable reproductions of childhood consoles. So I guess all that’s left now is to ask what are some of your favorite WiiWare and Wii Virtual Consoles releases? Are you excited for an N64 Classic? I know I am. Even though I’ll never forget the fun times I had with the Virtual Console, I think we should all just keep enjoying the classic games we love, no matter what they are called.
