Back To Nintendo

Less than 2 weeks away from the Wii U launch, a lot of people are skeptical and many are excited. I’m very excited for the Wii U; this is the first console that I’ve ever pre-ordered and the only one I have ever felt like I needed to pre-order. I got the Xbox 360 over a year after launch, PS3 six months after launch, Wii six months after launch, 3DS 6 months after launch and the PS Vita 3 months after launch. No console since the Nintendo 64 have I wanted to have immediately. 

Why now? A lot of my friends are asking me why I am even buying a Wii U because I already own all the other consoles. Let me give you some history, when I was around 5 years old my mom bought me a NES. I didn’t know anything about video games at the time and didn’t even know what it was. I knew I could play Duck Hunt, but that was it. Someone then showed me that I could also play Super Mario Bros on the cartridge and that changed everything. Super Mario was the game that made me a gamer, it was the game that kept me glued the tv for hours and hours on end. After awhile I started getting more and more games for the NES and I now considered myself to be a gamer. To this day my favorite NES game is Mike Tyson’s Punchout. Fast forward to the launch of the SNES, this was a time before I had Internet so I didn’t even know there was a new console launch. One of my neighbors invited me to his house to play his play his new Super Nintendo and I was like huh? I spent some time playing Super Mario World, well needless to say I got the SNES that same Christmas. The SNES was a game changer for me, it was the system that introduced me to Mortal Kombat. I can’t even tell you how many hours I poured into MK2 back then. MK2 is one of my all time favorite games. N64 I knew about the release from a magazine, and got it the same Christmas it was released. N64 took what the SNES did to a new level. Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, and Ocarina of Time were some of the best games ever made. N64 is probably my favorite console and with it came my favorite game of all time. Goldeneye 007, this game was the first time I had played a FPS on a console. I spent some serious time playing this game. I did eventually buy a Gamecube but didn’t like it at all, I sold it a few months after buying it and I had never sold a console before. I think the reason that I was disappointed by the Gamecube was because it didn’t compare to the games I was playing on the PS2 at the time. I got a PS2 just to play Grand Theft Auto 3 and I was slowly started become less of a Nintendo gamer. Eventually I got the Xbox, and then I got the 360, PS3, and the Wii. The Xbox 360 was my go to console for the longest time while the Wii collected dust, and the PS3 was just used for Bluray movies. I wanted to Wii to be awesome but because it wasn’t HD and couldn’t handle games like the PS3 and 360 did it just didn’t impress me. I wanted to play games like Assassin’s Creed in HD on my Wii but wasn’t possible. I played the 360 and argued that it had the best online service but realistically it was because that was the service all my friends used. Once I started playing the PS3 more I started to really like it more than the 360. I don’t have as many friends on the PS3 but I do really like the online service. So now the Wii U is coming, it is a powerful console with HD, one of most innovative controllers made, a great launch lineup and features that have the potential to change the way I watch TV and movies. I can go back to playing a Nintendo console and still get to play the same games that other consoles are getting. I can play these games in beautiful HD, and even continue playing on the controller when my wife takes over the TV. Nintendo is the company that helped shape me into a gamer and I’ve very excited to go back to them as my go to console. 

I got a chance to play the Wii U at Gamestop yesterday, I’ll end on this note, the controller feels perfect, the weight is amazing, the shape is amazing. I can’t even describe how awesome it felt, perfect is the only word I can think to use.