Random Roar: The Ultimate Loser of the Seventh Generation
As you may or may not have heard, the Wii Shop Channel is now permanently closed for business. As far as I can tell, it’s the first of the seventh generation’s digital distribution networks to officially go away, and is a reminder that all such services are only temporary. Eventually you will not be able to purchase PS1 classics for your PlayStation 3. Eventually the Xbox Live Arcade will no longer function on your Xbox 360. Even Valve won’t be immune. Steam is destined to disappear, although to be fair, it probably won’t happen anytime soon, but don’t be surprised if the state of PC games distribution in 2030 is a lot different than the state it’s in now.
It’s understandable if you didn’t hear about this amidst the other big thing that happened on the 29th. Here on Damage Control, we had the idea, months ago, to do a Wii Retrospective on the date that Nintendo literally pounded the last nail in the coffin of the console that once printed money for them. With the shutting down of the Wii Shop Channel, Nintendo has finally finished supporting the Wii.
Thing is… Nintendo stopped supporting this console years ago and just never told anyone. It can be argued that they stopped truly supporting it before the Wii U even came out. Oh, Nintendo of Japan and Nintendo of Europe were still giving it the old college try, but here in North America it felt like the Wii was just there sitting on its laurels of having outsold the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 and wasn’t putting in the effort to support those millions of consoles that had found their way into our homes. The Virtual Console’s output had slowed to a trickle despite there being a mountain of games to choose from. How could Spazfox have over a thousand Nintendo (NES) games on his computer and the Wii could only manage to scrounge up less than a hundred?
Okay, it’s probably because of licensing issues, that’s the biggest reason all of these official game archives end up failing. But that’s no excuse for how hard it was to get Nintendo of America to release games like The Last Story and Xenoblade Chronicles. They even made the latter of those GameStop exclusive as if to purposely hamstring the game and try to “prove” that it wasn’t going to sell well.
As a result of these shenanigans, the Nintendo Wii won the generation when it came to sales, but most of the gamers I know either didn’t have one or they did have one but didn’t have a lot of games for it. If I was going by my own game collection, the Wii finished dead last behind even the PSP. And that’s the sad truth about Nintendo’s behemoth. If even the PSP had more games for it that I wanted to play than the Wii did, then clearly someone at Nintendo of America dropped the ball.
The tragedy is that the Wii had a lot of potential. The console’s motion controls were an interesting way to introduce new ways to play a game. One of my favourite games for the system was Dragon Quest Swords: The Masked Queen and the Tower of Mirrors. It’s a Dragon Quest game “on rails”, it basically takes you through its levels for you and you attack the enemies on screen with your Wiimote as if it were a sword and shield. It showed the vast potential that having your very own sword and shield could offer players working their way through a medieval adventure, on top of whatever menu system the game would already have. Imagine if you could wander an open world game at your leisure, using the controls on the Wiimote to freely explore and if you get close enough to an enemy, you can use the Wiimote as a sword and swing it at them. It sounds like something the Elder Scrolls series could benefit immensely from, and that’s just for example.
I wish I could talk about other games for the system but other than something like Wii Sports, the Wii basically collected dust for me. In spring of 2017, I packed up all of my consoles and games and moved north. When the moving company arrived with all of my stuff, I chose which systems I wanted to have set up again. The Wii was one of the consoles I’d had set up back in Revelstoke and here in Fraser Lake, it’s stayed in its box, up on the shelf in my closet. I think that says everything that needs to be said about the Wii.
About The Author
Joseph
Panthera Editus | In the great frozen land in the north known as Canada, a little to the east of that other frozen land in the north known as Alaska, resides the gaming enthusiast whom most people know as Joseph. When he’s not gaming or writing about gaming, he likes to enjoy life’s little ironies. Twitter
