Email: I wouldn’t expect a pad upgrade

All rendering is done on the WiiU console hardware. The pad doesn’t have its own GPU, and from what I understand, the WiiU is already pretty limited in fill rate, and it’s pushed pretty hard if you want to render to both the TV and up to 2 pads at the same time. Doubling the pad resolution is probably out o the question. Basically, the WiiU is like a dumb terminal version of the Vita. How Nintendo thinks this is an evolution of [i]anything[/i] baffles me. The Wii Remote was something truly new. The WiiU pad is basically a really terrible handheld tethered to a home console. If Nintendo were following the disruption playbook WiiU would be about taking everything that made the Wii great, making it better, and fixing the problems.

Not only that, but they’re actually killing the Wii revolution off. I can’t believe this doesn’t get talked about more, but the Wii Remote just got reduced to the status of a peripheral. With every single console from time immemorial, peripheral = not everyone has one = few games use it. Motion controls are done. Finito. Dead. Any motion-controlled game is now a game you can’t play right out of the box.

This confirms what we all started to realize around the time Mario Galaxy 2 was announced. Nintendo sees the Wii as a stepping stone to the Gamecube. They’re not asking, “What kind of games would people like to play, and how do we make money off that?” They’re asking, “What kind of games do we want to make, and how do we get people to buy them?” They’re right back to their old ways–criticizing the customer for “not understanding” the brilliant product, flogging dead-horse ideas, refusing to do things everyone wants if they didn’t think of it first, and solving made-up “problems” that no one actually has.

That last one is referring to their “Ask your friends for help using Nintendo’s crappy version of Twitter” function, which solves the “problem” of not knowing what GameFAQs is.Trying to get us to like what they really want to make certainly is what was behind the 3DS. It is amazing that the ‘innovation’ is what they’ve been trying to sell to us since the Virtual Boy. What a coincidence.

When the N64 came out, Nintendo essentially said, “3d is the new normal.” I said that was bullshit, and I stopped buying consoles. Have you noticed that when Nintendo begins to emphasize 3d is when their console sales run into huge problems? If Nintendo made the N64 for EVERYONE and not just ‘only 3d’, I think they wouldn’t have had so many problems. And if the 3DS had many of the traditional games we loved from the DS and other Nintendo handhelds, Nintendo wouldn’t have had so many problems with the 3DS.

A reader says, “But if you don’t like it, just don’t buy it, Malstrom.” Oh, you are so 1996 reader. We’ve been there, we’ve done that. What more does it have to take? How many times must we reject their ‘3d’ or whatever trojan horse so they get the message?

You people may laugh at me, but just wait when Metroid: Other M 2 is announced. How would that make you feel? Now welcome to my world for the past fifteen years.