Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 84: Wii

Episode Date: January 30, 2017

It's hard to believe, but the Wii celebrated its tenth birthday last year, putting it within our extremely loose definition of "retro." And thankfully, it's a topic worthy of the Retronauts treatment. Not only does the Wii amount to Nintendo's biggest success, it's also unlikely any subsequent system will ever sell more than this underpowered little box that made our motion-control dreams come true... when we still had them. On this episode of Retronauts, join Bob Mackey, Jeremy Parish, Brett Elston, and Mikel Reparaz as the crew looks back on a not-too-distant past full of Wiis and waggle. Be sure to visit our blog at Retronauts.com. And if you'd like to send a few bucks our way, head on over to our Patreon page!

This week on Retronauts, we would like to play. Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Retronauts. post for this one, Bob Mackey. And today's topic is the Nintendo Wii. Yes, the Nintendo Wii is now old. It was old in November officially at turn 10, and that's when I wanted to record this episode. But so much

horrible things happened to me. You were actually dead that week. I was dead, and I briefly went to hell. And I'm back now here to talk about the Wii. That's where we all are now. Yes. Now we're all in hell. So, you know, it wasn't so bad, you guys. You get used to it, I think. So let's see who else is here today. Talk about the Wii.

What's up? It's a me. Mario. No, wait, Jeremy. Jeremy. And who else do we have here today? Flagrant non-wee expert Michael Rappares. Oh, man. What are you doing here, Michael? I don't know.

Oh, wait, I invited you. Damn it. And then we also have... What's that nepotism? Number one, red steel player in the world, Brad Elston. Wow. I have not seen the leaderboards in some time, so I'm going to take your word for it. That's not true.

I'd still believe you, though. I just felt like I couldn't claim to be a Wii expert in Brett's presence since he was the Wii editor. Yeah, it's a weird. I'm sure we'll get into it. Yeah, I mean, that's why... I mean, Jeremy has to be here by law, by Retronaut's Law. But I brought on Brett and Michael because they were in the industry as Jernos when the Wii launch. I wasn't.

I was just a jerk who would eventually become a freelancer the next year. And I was on the outside. So we're going to have different perspectives about this. And we won't be talking about the virtual console because Jeremy had an episode about that. I believe it was called 10 shitty years of virtual console the first time there was a swear in a Retronaut's title. So there you go. So, I want to say that I got a lot of this information from the Awada asks about the Wii. I believe it might have been the first Awada asks, or one of the first, definitely.

But it is an extremely, extremely long, really, really in-depth conversation about the Wii. They talk about certain aspects for much longer than you would suspect, like the photo channel. We'll get into that later. But it's very interesting. All of my information about the Wii comes from that. Also other interviews. But if you really want to read everything outside of what we talk about on the show, definitely check that out. I'll have a link to it on the blog when this episode posts.

But before we start, I do want to go over some basic info about the Wii just to, in case you forgot. So it's originally a release date was in November 19, 2006, and it released a bit later in Japan, December 2, 2006, at the retail price of $249. For some reason, I was thinking it was $1.99, but I guess originally it was $2.49, undercutting the competition by $50, $500. So this... Actually, it was... It wasn't, no, PlayStation 3 was like $599, $599, and that came out at the same time. And I worked more to buy one that year, actually. I had to get a second job.

And it's just so easy to do that, isn't it? Especially when there's a huge recession. So this had many, many first for Nintendo. This was the first console for them that had online capabilities right out of the box. No buying a modem or anything like that. The first console with internal storage, the first console with backwards compatibility. Of course, you could play your GameCube games on the Wii. The first console with a home screen that had functionality beyond just choosing a game.

The DS had a sort of a home screen kind of thing, but that was a bit different. This, you could update the OS, and you can buy things digitally online because that was happening now in the realm of consumers buying things online, digital software. And this console sold a lot. This console sold 102 million units, making it the only the third best-selling console to date. So it's slightly under the PS1. And nothing in the history of the world will ever beat the PS2, which sold 50 million more. Because essentially, the PS2 was just a DVD player as well. So that is how it really got into people's homes.

That was my peak retail Toys R Us years, and it was like every single hour of every day for five years. Just those two's, PS2's. Huge pyramids of blue boxes in front of you, moving out the door. And, I mean, we talk a lot about Nintendo on the show, and we usually view them as a very conservative company. But the Wii was, it really belies that. I mean, there are a lot of conservative aspects of the Wii, but it is a very unexpected move for a company like Nintendo to make, where they did the complete opposite of every other console manufacturer. Instead of just building off of making the bigger, better thing of the last thing, it's like it's a completely new idea, a completely new concept. And it will go into why they made these choices, but it's a very interesting conversation on that Iwada asked between all the developers.

So some key figures in the development of the Wii. And I'm sorry, I'm kind of reciting all these notes, but I will give you guys a chance to jump in soon. So we have Satoro Iwato, RIP, of course. This is previously a console at Nintendo was just designed by a guy. And it was usually, what's his name, Uihara? Uri Mura. That's right. This time, it was a team.

Well, that's not quite true. The N64 was developed by a team. It was co-developed with Silicon Graphics. Okay, cool, yeah. It was very collaborative. So we have a few memorable names from the, this. We have Genio Takeda. If you want to know more about him, see our Punchout episode. He is mainly a hardware designer who's done a lot of great things for Nintendo. He's directed a few games

like Punch Out and Star Tropic's, but he's mainly known for hardware, and he is Nintendo's oldest employee. I think he's now been there over 40 years, and he has not retired yet. So he's still hanging in there, and he was one of the main figureheads of the Wii. And a lot of these guys that follow Satoriawata and Genio Takeda are basically just engineers we don't hear very much about. So I'll just go over there names real quick. There's Junji Takamoto. He is the section manager for Nintendo IR&D.

He developed the system structure and the controller. Kenichiro Ashida, he was in charge of the physical design of the controller and the console as well as the logos and the packaging. And Kao Shiota, who was in charge of the technological aspects of the Wii. So these are like basically the

five architects of the Wii, although Nintendo employees had a lot of input in the development of the Wii. which actually started immediately after Nintendo released the GameCube in 2001. And this is something we're seeing a bit with the Switch, and this is going to be stuck in time forever because this podcast is taking place directly after Nintendo Switch events, about a week after.

So it's interesting I'm seeing some corollaries in that the Wii was basically taking an underpowered approach. Nintendo felt that cutting-edge graphics were not as important as fresh experiences, and they felt like if you get people good graphics, they only want better graphics after that. So if that is your selling point for a console, they're immediately just going to want more on top of that. And they weren't interested in that. Yeah, they made a really ballsy decision with this system

not to give it HD output. Because at the point that this came out, most people did not own HD televisions. I did not. But that was, it was right at the cusp. I had just bought one to go with my Xbox 360 that I bought that summer, like six or eight months after the system came out. out. But, you know, that put me at sort of the cutting edge of people. Like, most people

didn't own an HDTV, but it was right around the corner. And it was like, you know, with PlayStation 2 and DVDs, like everyone was about to jump in to that market. So they made a very deliberate decision not to future-proof the console. Yeah. And it didn't really hurt. I want to know from Michael and, I mean, when did you enter the HD era? And was it, was it, you know, around the time of the Wii? Were you playing the Wii on an SD-T? when you were first playing these games? It just so happened that the, like, HD era, because I moved to California in 2005 in November, so I got here, obviously, with no, I didn't, I moved out in a suitcase, so I didn't have a TV on me.

So it's like, well, I'm going to go to Best Buy, and they really only have HD TVs, even in 2005. It was that or pay just as much for a gigantic 4x3 awful tube TV. So that's around when I made the jump, even though I didn't get a 3-6. 60 at launch, so I didn't have a console that made use of that HDTV for almost a year, I think. And Michael, how about you? I'm just curious as to... I think I was on an SDTV for a while after I first got a Wii, and I remember, like, you know, obviously Dead Rising was something that kind of pushed me to think I needed an HDTV. But for whatever reason, it was really complicated at the time.

Like, I remember, like, now it seems so easy in retrospect, like, oh, yeah, 480P, 720P, 1080P, we all know what these things mean now. back then there was like all this mystery and these very brand specific terms floating around and I remember we had an editor who was like I'm going to write a guide to which HDTV you need he's like but I'm going to have to like get into some hard numbers here and like you know make this really complicated like no and almost right out of the gate there was the the we component cable thing if you even if you even want the P in 480P you need this component cable which was the same is the GameCube one, I think, wasn't it? No, it was not.

It was not. The GameCube one is actually really interesting because it has the decoder inside the cable. That is not built into the system. That's why it's so rare and expensive because the cable itself is actually doing the progressive output. The Wii component cable cannot be used on the GameCube and vice versa. And the GameCube had that special output port that only worked with this very rare cable. I got one just for F0GX. Like, I can't make a pasta, man.

I used to sell it in. Put your children through college. Ooh, man. Oh, really? The GameCube and SNES video control, video output cables were interchangeable. You could plug them into both of that. Yeah, and you could still use that on the Wii. Oh, really?

Okay. Couldn't you? Yeah, I think it might be different. Yeah. Okay. No, I remember because, okay, so my, I might be getting ahead here, but my Wii experience was that I was assigned by request to review Twilight Princess for one-up.

And so that came in about a week before the Wii launch. And I took the system home with me along with the component cable that they gave us. And I played on my HDTV and it was fine. But then like two days into the review, game videos needed the component cable

to do some capture. So I had to go into the office and give them that cable. And I was using like the standard cables. Composite, right? Yeah. And it was like someone was stabbing my eyeballs. It was such a huge downgrade. Yeah.

I was like, I can't play this. It's so gross. Fortunately, the next day I got the cable back and was able to use it to finish out the game. But, man, like, it was, that was a precious, precious gift at that point. So as far as the development goes with the Wii, the main goal was to create a system that would minimize power consumption as much as possible because it was meant to be left on at all time. So their goal with this was to consume as little power as possible.

So the kind of phrase they use Or the kind of thesis they used To operate under was a console where something new happens every day And the way they talk about this in the Awata asks Like Iwada pulled a very Steve Jobs move And it's like he comes in with these DVD cases It's like these two DVD cases I want the console to be no bigger than this

Or maybe it was three But that was basically a stipulation Like we want this to be inconspicuous To fit within any existing entertainment center And it was basically like We don't want this to look like a game console We just want this look like a rectangle. You can just squeeze into anywhere.

It won't get hot. It won't warm up. It won't make a lot of noise. It will fit into anything. That whole power consumption thing, though, like I remember I was, the default thing was for it to be left on 24-7, that it wouldn't power off. It would go into sleep mode. Yeah.

But I still used very little power, even in sleep mode. But I started noticing, like, a couple weeks in, it's like, oh, my God, when I touch this thing, it's red hot. It did heat up, yeah. And I really liked the functionality that that 24-7 leave it on introduced because I thought that the news channel was really cool. Like, oh, here's just a place that collates a bunch of stories from around the world and I can go and look at them. I really like the map channel. Oh, the globe.

Don't forget the me parade. That was my favorite thing about that. Like when the Wii first came out, you know, I was the guy writing about we at oneup.com, which had the big online community. so I started sharing my code and getting other people's codes so immediately I filled out my friends list like day one and you could turn on like the

ability to get people's MES to passively show up on your system and also people whose MES had showed up on their system would come in so after a while I had thousands and thousands of MES and it was really cool to just like watch

for 20 minutes as this entire list of MES marched across but the problem was that whenever you took in all those mes and used the system for the first time, it had to, like, process that. And I would turn on my system, and sometimes it would just be a black screen

hanging and processing all these knees for like 15 minutes of time. And I was like, is my system broken? But no, it was just like, I don't know, somehow spooling all these knees that it acquired. So that suggests, like, unlike putting a PS4 in rest mode where it could actually download and process things,

Like, it was just kind of sitting there aware that, like, oh, I have things to do when I turn on, but I'm not going to do them until it turns out. I don't know, but it was kind of weird. So, Michael has reminded us that they actually didn't meet one of their goals, but in a way they kind of did. They wanted to reduce the heat buildup, so the fan wouldn't turn on at night. The fear that Iwada had was a mother would, or like a parent would hear the fan on at night and be like, oh, my kid left their game machine on. I'm going to unplug it, or I'm going to turn it off. It's like, no, this thing needs to be on at all times. It is a thing that you use.

It's a lifestyle machine. to check in at all times. And so they tried to reduce heat buildup as much as possible. I believe early wees had an issue with the graphics card in which it might have been caused by the heat, like it loosened some of the glue or whatever was holding that graphics card in place. So you would see like corrupted graphics in 3D games sometimes with early wees. It never happened to me, but it was an issue with other things.

A quick weird thing about those channels and the sleep mode and everything was the blue light that would pulse. Yes. When you would know, like, you'd walk out in the middle of the night. to get a drink of water. I'm like, why is the room glowing blue? What, like, the first time it happened, I had no clue. And I'm like, I realized that it could light up an entire room.

Yes. It's like, if anything's going to convince a mother that the game system on. But the weirdest thing was like, a GDC, maybe 08, oh, 8, oh, 9, something like that. They, it might have been in water. I can remember who was in the room, but they gave a talk on, like, what it was, because it would flicker and it would pulse, and they described, like, what the flicker was. It was like a warbler or something. It was like a bird. and if they're like, oh, look, here we'll play the birds, you know,

you know, man, what do birds do? Trill. Tweet. That's what they do. There we go. And they, like, played a recording of that next to the light, and you could see it go like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. And it glowed in unison with that call.

And everybody was like, huh. Well, anyway, when's the next Metroid? I didn't realize they were using a bird metaphor for their LEDs. That's weird. I feel like also, you mentioned how bright it was. This was the beginning of the era where everything had a searing LED when you turned it off. So your room at night was just all these different colors emanating from different parts of the

room. I really hate that. I hope that goes away soon, but it's like we can never have true darkness. It's always tiny lights. I use an eye mask to sleep now. It's gotten bad. It's like an air purifier or PS4. Yeah, there's just like if there's any kind of stereo, it's just like you walk in and like I can see comfortably

in this room. It's like, I don't even have a car light. My 3DS has three lights. The charging light, the online light and the power light. Wow, great. Yeah. Anyways. Street pass. Oh, four lights. So we should. the controller, obviously inspired by the accessibility of the DS, and it almost featured a touchpad that was nearly something they implemented in the device.

I'm assuming that either the technology wasn't there or it would be expensive. And as we know from Nintendo, they try to make things for as little money as possible, but do interesting things with that technology. So the Wii controller came out of this process before the Wii came out where Geno Takeda created about 20 to 10 teams. Sorry, 10 to 20 teams of two to three people each. And their goal was to create a dedicated peripheral for a game concept. And I believe the bongos came out of this. The Donkey Kongo bongos came out of this whole initiative. Nice.

But one of the things that came out of it was this sort of a, think of like a divining rod. I know every kid has one in their backyard, right? Of course. But sort of this, this, so you're holding something by two prongs and there's one prong sticking out of it. And that was a concept for a game that never happened. that inspired the Wii controller design. So it's like, why can't it just be a rod itself? Why do we need the two prongs to hold onto?

So it essentially came out of that. But I feel like the other thing was the metaphor of a remote control, again, trying to be accessible. People see that and they know how to interact with it. We talked about this on earlier Retronauts where I feel like my parents were cool the NES. The second the Super Nintendo came out, it's like, this is too many buttons. I'm not going to doing this anymore. And I feel like that's my worry about the Switch, not to date this podcast. But the switch is sort of reaching for that casual audience with some concepts.

But I feel like you pick up one of those controllers and there's like 30 buttons on it. And you're like, okay, you guys can play with this. I'm not going to do that. So they really hit a sweet spot with the Wii controller. It had the simplicity of a remote controller. But with a lot of buttons that weren't overbearing to someone who had never played a game before. Yeah. I mean, it got to that point where like, I mean, I think everybody has some anecdote of a parent who hadn't played a game since Atari or NES.

And they were like, oh, yeah, we played that bowling game. It was great. Yeah. I mean, and our friend's parents bought a Wii fit and a Wii fit just to do that. And it's like, nobody was buying in 64s to, like, a parent. To get in shape. Yeah, to get in shape or to, like, keep up with their kids or anything. Yeah, I went to Thanksgiving 2010 at a friend's place in New York.

And their elderly Vietnamese parents, like immigrant parents, were still playing Wii sports every day. And they, like, challenged us. And they kicked our asses. Like, they loved it. They played it every day and were really good at, like, Wii bowling and wee tennis. Well, you would hear all those stories about the Wii in nursing homes and, you know, old people who played video games for the first time

and got into it because of the accessibility. Well, I still remember I was working at a newspaper when the Wii prototype, the first images, came out. And my immediate knee-jerk reaction to those photos was horror. Yes. Like, this thing... I think we were all there, Michael, yeah. Yeah, there's no elegance here.

like, what is this wire connecting one half of the controller to the other? Like, what do I do with this? This looks awful. I went to my one-up.com blog and wrote about it and how bad I thought it was. That's gone forever now, Michael. I'm sorry. I know. I'm glad mine's gone.

But there was also the birth of the lifestyle shot of a bunch of impossible people playing in an impossibly large loft. Yeah. Everyone's wearing white. We're wearing white in my mental patients? They're in the waiting room for a, uh, What it was Boys to Men videos. And one of our favorite... When you die and go to heaven, you play Wii.

If only. One of our favorite things to do back then, though, was around the time when we'll get to this, I'm sure, like... I don't want to say revolt, but the full-on, like, abandonment of, like, a hardcore audience of the Wii. Yeah, we'll get there. Around the time of that when, like, oh, Manhunt's coming out and blah, blah, blah. So we would then make lifestyle shots of those games with Manhunt and any other em-rated game. So it says, girl, swinging a bat, and in the corner, instead of we... We baseball.

It's someone cutting someone's head up. I also remember like that weird optimism about like before we'd actually used a Wii controller, just the idea of motion control. Like imagine what this will enable. And I remember like talking to some of the developers from Yukes about like, what are you going to do when you're bringing WWE games to the Wii? And they're like, oh, well, you know, we've given a lot of thought to what we can do with that. Like you can hold it like this and do a suplex or whatever. And, yeah, we'll talk about that later. And, like, yeah, then we had the reality of the weak controller.

It's like, oh, waggle. Okay. Yeah. We can detect four things with this. Yeah, and I mean, it was kind of sold on a lie where we, I'm not going to say they were completely dishonest, but I think our minds jumped to this conclusion where it would be that one-to-one. I'm going to move the thing.

It'll move in real time. It'll track my entire body's movement somehow. And I think maybe we were probably full into thinking of that at first. We were fooled. We were full of this. Wait, I don't get it. I think we were all, like, under the assumption, at least I was, like, oh, yeah, this will track me throughout the room. I don't know what the technology is, but after a few rounds of Wii Sports, you're like, oh, I get it.

I get what's happening now. And it wouldn't be until 2009 when Nintendo made that Wii Motion Plus Wii Sports Resort and Skyward Sword, where it did achieve the dream of that one-to-one. But it did take three years, and by that time, Brad, you're right, like, no one cared anymore about the Wii. And at least, you know, gamers are the important people. And that was the time, like, I was trying to make a hard, because I was still the Nintendo editor by this point, but I was veering away. I think I, well, at the end of O'9, I was senior editor with,

I didn't have to live entirely in Nintendo World anymore. But one of the last things I remember playing and really trying to be like, no, guys, trust me, this is good, was Red Steel 2, which was motion plus third-party Ubisoft thing. Which was about as close as we got to, like, that lightsaber dual game that everybody. Kind of, yeah. It was just like the only one was coming. The only one I felt like,

like that I felt like a badass anime sword gun like trigon mixed with full metal alchemists like somewhere in between I was like this is really cool and no one's going to play this and it will never be ported it'll never be available anywhere and that kind of sucks because the first game got kind of a

middling reaction and then the second one is like I forget all that and the motion plus helped that game immensely. Yeah I don't think Dragon Quest swords had that effect even though I wanted it to be good I believe Jeremy had the best pun in the world for that game. Did I? You called it slime crisis? Yes.

That was so smart. That's why I remember that. But, I mean, if you think of the GameCube controller, Nintendo, they're like, this is the logical conclusion of traditional controller design. That blows my mind. I disagree. This is not the logical conclusion of anything.

I mean, I'm thinking of it. I mean, you pick up a GameCube controller, you know what you're doing with it, but that is the most alien thing to a non-gamer. Oh, absolutely. A bunch of different shapes, a bunch of different colors, like hidden buttons. It's asymmetrical.

Yeah. It doesn't, yeah. A C-stick is there, but they're like, well, what could be, what could you possibly, do from here. Like, they didn't want to make it, a traditional controller would make it simpler, but they just decided to go for the Wii Mote. And then we have the litany of accessories.

We have, of course, the classic controller, which always bugged me because they would never do the X and Y buttons with the divot in them. And I believe that was an S&S thing only, not Super Famicom, correct? Yes. I think so, yeah. But I love that just by feel, you know which button your fingers on, your thumb is on. Of course, we have the Nunchuk, which was essential for analog controls. It just attached to the Wii Mote.

the pro classic controller, which was basically a very traditional Xbox PlayStation-style controller. It invented basically for Monster Hunter. Try. Really? Okay. I don't know. That's not a factual thing. I'm sure that it helps, you know. I feel like I'm trying to remember the launch of that, and I feel like it had to be timed around because when three came to the Wii in Japan, it's like, that's good and all, but we need a real controller to play Monster Hunter. Yeah. I can't remember the timing, but I feel like they're pretty pretty close. As I think about that, I do think that they came out at the same time, at least here.

Yeah, if you're here, yeah. We had all manner of plastic things for people with no imagination. Like, here's a tennis racket. You can slide your thing into. A Mario car steering wheel. Yes. Oh, I mean, Nintendo did that themselves. God damn it.

But at least that sort of serves a purpose. And like, you can hold the controller like a steering wheel and turn it, whatever. It could theoretically improve your performance in a wheel. The tennis racket, the baseball bat, these things do nothing. You're just making it a bigger stick, basically. Like the Zapper attachment, I thought that made sense. Turn it into a gun? Okay, yes.

That was like one of the original things. The idea of it made sense. The actual Zapper didn't make much sense. I love my details. My favorite was, I think it was an entire raft that you sat in for one of the... No, that was for Kinect. It was a whole branded raft that he was sitting. And I think somebody came up with it after like watching video of that one parade editor and his family play the raft game.

Good, anyway. It's good thing Cirque de Soleil wasted their time. I'm introducing that to the world. That is one of my least favorite moments of the last 10 years. I don't blame you at all. So let's talk about the launch. So I was on the sidelines, and I feel like it was the last time I really felt that just consumer mania overtake my body, where it was like, I was driving back from my girlfriend's house. She lived a bit farther away from me, and it was the day the Wii was released.

And all of a sudden was like, I need this. I need this. So I was like just driving around, stopping at every store. And I was like, I'm such an idiot. Why didn't I pre-order this? Why do I care about it now suddenly? But everybody else here was in the press. And I'm just curious as to what your launch stories are.

Both of you guys were at Games Radar, correct? And Jeremy was that one-up? I know. Jeremy, let's start with you. Like, what was the one-up we launch like? Well, you mean, like, for me, pre-ordering a system or at the site? As a member of the press. As a member of the press.

What were people thinking? What was the vibe, I guess, of everybody? I mean, the vibe was like, ha, ha, ha, waggle. But on the other hand, Mark McDonald's coverage of the Revolution Reveal in Tokyo was pretty much the most successful story we had ever run. I linked that in the notes, and it's very positive. Yeah, it's very, very positive. He had good things to say about it, and we just blew off the doors with traffic on that. So even though there was this kind of like, ah, ha, ha, Nintendo, at the same time, there was a realization like, oh, people are into this.

And I think, you know, the DS's performance had been a cautionary tale also. Everyone dismissed that. And then, after a while, it turned out to be a huge deal. So, yeah, there was definitely this sort of like almost a grudging coverage of it. Like, people knew it was important, but they kind of didn't want to care because it wasn't cool enough. Some people were into it, like legitimately. Some people, not so much. And there was always this kind of attitude that it was.

was just a fad. It was going to go away soon. And it did after like four years. Yes, eventually that four year fad died. Okay. But no, it just kept outlasting everyone's predictions. And, you know, there would there would be just enough like legitimately great games like Mario Galaxy that would come along and kind of, you know, force everyone to reevaluate their opinion. And there were people definitely at One Up and in the game group who, you know, they would normally have enjoyed a game like Mario Galaxy, but they dismissed it out of hand because it was on Wii. So it was a very divisive system, I would say. Genuine enthusiasm, genuine disdain, some grudging respect, some crossover. I don't know. I guess, you know, pretty much typical. But yeah, it wasn't,

it wasn't poohed quite as much as the DSAD. Yeah. And I mean, the Wii came out as all of the one-up podcast were sort of taking off. So all of those impressions are really frozen in time. And there's a various amount of them. But I just remember a distinct, like, fascination with this, with this strange thing. I want to do Brett's story last because I know his story is the most interesting, or at least the most outlandish. Do you want to know about my pre-order experience? Ooh, tell me.

Because, you know, even though I reviewed the Zelda Twilight Princess and had access to that Wii, that was the company's Wii. Yeah, I went out to the GameStop at Fisherman's Warf at, like, 4 or 5 a.m. and ended up lining up there with a bunch of other guys from the Tavis game group who had the same idea. But for whatever reason, I think, maybe it was because of the PS2 launch. There was just this instinct that, like, we probably need to jump on this thing

and get the pre-orders in. So we lined up really early. We pre-ordered, pre-paid the system. And then, you know, when the system family came out, yeah, it was sold out everywhere. So those of us who had pre-ordered went to the midnight launch at Fisherman's Wharf again. and I remember going there with my wife, who was my girlfriend at the time,

and one of her schoolmates, they were, you know, photography students together. And they, like, roamed around fishermen's wharf for hours, taking photos of stuff. So I, like, went in, I got my system. It took, like, 30 minutes to buy the system and some games. And then they were nowhere to be seen. And this was, like, I had a cell phone at this point, but they weren't picking up. So I was like, okay, so I went to the internet. and out burger with this expensive video game system that everyone wanted.

Everybody wanted, yeah. And it's like 1 a.m. And there's all kinds of weirdos at this 24-hour, in-and-out burger at Fisherman's War. Yeah, any fast food place in SF is a part homeless shelter, part of way house, part-up. I was like, well, I'm just going to sit here and have some French fries and play Final Fantasy 5 on Game Boy Advance and review it. Wow, yeah. So that's my time capsule. The shortages are interesting because I feel like, I don't know what the Xbox 1 and PS4 were like because I was catastrophically unemployed.

when those came out. But this feels like the last true console shortage in a big, big way. I mean, the PS2, there was a huge shortage. I remember reserving one in, like, May or April and being one to the last before they cut them off. So I had one on launch, but nobody else did that I knew. And this one was the same. Like, the console came out in 2006, November. I was looking for one.

I did not get one until February of 2008. I was on one of those, like, Amazon will text you when there was one in the store. to run to your computer and get one. And that's when I got one. But it took like 18 months almost to get a wee. There was a little Japanese cafe just around the block from me. And it's like this little hole in the wall shop. You go buy some food, whatever. And they have, you know, like little handcrafted knickknacks and stuff in the window that you could buy. But up on the counter, they had a Wii system that they were selling for $400. And eventually it disappeared. So I think they actually sold it for that huge markup. And the reason I ordered a, I ordered a

Wii you when they went on sale because it was just the novelty of like I can just buy something with money I don't have to stand in the line I mean I don't know if the demand was there as it was for the Wii but the novelty of just being able to buy a console was what got me the Wii and I still like it but it was just like wow I can actually buy this thing after after 10 years of shortages and waiting yeah Michael how about you where were you what were you doing were you interested I don't remember of course I was interested because you know we'd all been seeing months of hype about this thing I don't remember the the the in the games radar office so well

Brett might have a better memory. I seem to remember like Nintendo sent us one in like a box that made played music when you opened it. Oh no, there's a little bit more to it. I think that was one of the three DSs, wasn't it? Yeah. The DSs? Yes, came like a, the DSI, I think, came in a cake. Yeah. It was a stupid cake.

Chained to several women. No, that was a three-d-s. That was an odd choice. I don't miss those gimmicks. My pre-order story is very sad, and that I had two stores near my house that I thought were likely to have whee's. And there were a Toyser Us and a Comp USA.

And I went to the Toyser Us and it's like, oh, man, there's a huge line. I don't really want to wait in that. I'll go over to the CompuSA. Hot, there's no line here. This is great. Typical day at Compuess. Yeah, stood outside and, like, yeah, and waited for opening. And like some employees started coming in and letting themselves in.

And then somebody came out and was like, can we help you? Like, yeah, are you guys going to have the Wii today? And like, hang on. let me check and went inside and talked for a bit like, no, no, we're not, we don't have the way. So I go over to the Toys R Us and the line is pretty huge. There's like about

maybe 30 people they hand out tickets and there's like maybe 30 people in front of me from the place where the tickets cut off. So, and then they're like, oh yeah, we're out of tickets. If you don't have a ticket, go home. And so like, knowing that it's like if I'd just gone straight there and hopped

in line, there was a chance that I probably could had gotten one. As it was, I had to wait until like February, I think, and like watching those sites that are like, this target in Colma or whatever, we'll have this many wheeze in on this day. And so, like, going to, I think the target in Nevada had, like, one of those alerts. And so I, like, woke up at like five in the morning, went out, stood in line with a ton of other people, and was near the back of the line when they were handing out the tickets, got one. But I remember, like, and then we had to wait, like, another hour or two before they'd actually open the store and let us all in to buy them. Yeah.

And during this time, like, I kept seeing, like, dads with their kids in tow coming out at, like, 8 a.m. And it's like, oh, you should have gotten here earlier. And, you know, had the angel and demon on my shoulders going, like, maybe you should give your ticket to one of these kids so they can have a nice Christmas or whatever. And like, no, no, no, screw them. More for me. I got here first. And then when I got in there, it was like this long procession of what games do you want? want, and everybody's like, Zelda. What game do you want?

Zelda, yeah. Everybody. Pretty much. Brett, I know you've got an interesting story to tell about this. Yeah, well, the story of like, oh, there's not, when's the next time we'll have a legitimate shortage? All these stories remind me of the classic NES. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, exactly. It's not quite the same thing, obviously, but like... It is a console. It was the last time I saw people lined up and, like, desperately trying to like, this Best Buy says they'll have six tomorrow morning, and then you go and there's 60 people in line, and I'm like, why did I even do this?

Like, of course I wouldn't get here because someone's going to show up at three in the morning. But that just started reminding me of another Nintendo recent memory of shortage. But so the Wii was weird for me because, like, I had only been a games journalist for a year. And, you know, all through college, I mean, you could argue most of a waking life.

Like, that's what I want to do. I want to be involved in games, writing about games. Like, whatever I can do. Like, I don't know precisely what I want, but even a young age, it's like, this is the direction I want to move. and then it finally happens. Like, you freelance for a while from the Midwest,

and then you eventually get a job offer and you move out, and then I'm doing it. And I'm assigned the Nintendo editor. That's what I interviewed four, so that's why I was doing it. But it was a tail end of the GameCube, which was not glamorous either, because, like, that last year the GameCube was kind of like... It was bad.

Yeah, so I was like, well... Hey, O'Dama, right? Odama, I mean... Remember the X-Men, the official game of the movie or whatever? Like, how much worse it looked on GameCube? I reviewed five versions of that beautiful. Beautiful game, but it was like, it's like, I did it. Okay, well, the GameCube is kind of fizzling out.

It's been four or five years, but the next machine, the revolution, man, I can't wait to see what that's all about. And then around April or whenever was they revealed the Wii Remote, the office kind of gets pretty snickery because it's like, really, that's your controller? And the Wii, the DS hadn't blown up yet because the DS light wasn't out in the US yet. So it was very skeptical. And I'm kind of like, oh, boy, is this the machine I have to cover? this seems like a disruptive lifestyle thing that, like, that's not why I got into games,

and that's not why I wanted to do this. And, like, less than six months on the job, I'm like, am I even, like, the right person for this? Because I'm going to go in, like, where's Mario? Or, like, I didn't know. It was such a big question mark. And then the first E3 was like, here's Project Hammer, and here's a paper airplane simulator. And it's like, where's a game that I can play?

Wait, what did Project Hammer turn into? I think they just killed it. It turned into nothing. Nothing. Yeah. Turned into an unseen 64. We're an article. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. That's a lot of things do, yeah. And that was just a runaround and waggle instead of push a button. And I'm like, that's not crazy, interesting, groundbreaking stuff. You just replaced a button press with a shake, which is what 90% of the Wii game started out to be. But then around the launch, it was like, they, Nintendo had an on-site thing in their office to play Twilight Princess for like three or four days. And really being able to sit down and play Zelda at least was like, okay, I'm at least into this. The waggle's a little weird, but it is what it is.

and the game itself is great. So I'm at least on board for this. Playing Wii Sports was like, I get why this will be big and trying to convince people in the office to not be so dismissive when there's like a PS3 on the horizon and 360s finally coming into its own

and all the hype around gears and all this other stuff. It was like, and HD, HD, HD, the new era is here. And you're like, well, there's my regular definition bowling game. And, hey, man, that's 480P. But then by the time the thing launched,

it was like, Yeah, guess what? They turned Wii bowling on, and everyone in the office wants to come over and play. It's like, there you go. So the mood, like you said, is very divisive. It would be like, when it's not turned on, what a piece of crap. The moment it turned on, it's like, I bet I could take you in tennis right now. And that was fun.

But when it finally came out, they delivered, I guess, the first units, like maybe a week early. And the way that they did that was they drove around the Bay Area in an ice cream truck and handed out whys from this ice cream truck. Like, here's the office Wii. I thought that was the Wii U. No, because I was... I guess they did both. They might have done it again, yeah. Because Wii U, I was...

By then I was at Capcom, so I didn't... I don't know what they did for that, but it could... Maybe they went back to the well with the ice cream truck. They just threw it through a window. But yeah, yeah, yeah. Take it. Get it. But so I went from like these super conflicted thoughts to,

it just so happened. They showed up on my birthday in an ice cream truck, handing me the new Nintendo system with a copy of Zelda on top, and I'm just like, this is the greatest moment of my life. And because I was the Nintendo editor And no one else Like we had a pretty small staff So like you were the Sony guy

And through and through And we had a Microsoft guy And we had a PC guy So it's like No one else is going to use this So while it wasn't mine mine It was no one else's Like on personal use

So like it felt like I was being handed This wee of my own And at a time when I knew This is going to be so hard to find And I don't know It was just a very specific happy memory And then over the course Of a couple of years

It went from this very cool novelty to I'm now trying to argue why, no, no, no, Dead Space Extraction is actually a really cool, interesting idea because, like, look at all this cold shaky cam stuff. And they didn't just try to pour the crappy version of Dead Space over. They did something different. And even if it's a mediocre to good, at least it's something completely distinct. And I thought extraction was really cool. I remember you thinking extraction. I thought it was.

There were so many cool gross out moments. in that game that were horrifying, like, cutting off your own arm, like, what was an interesting approach to, like, everybody else just saw it as like, this is a light gun shooter. The light gun game, but it was like you're embedded in this thing. Anyway, but the other thing was, and I forgot about this part, the lead up to it, right after they, I think right after it did launch, that first Christmas had passed, and now it's like January, February 07, and I could, I felt like already, like, this is going to fizzle.

It may take two years, it may take two or three, who knows, but, like, Wii Sports is a huge phenomenon. All the people who lined up for this aren't going to come back in the same droves for a Wii Sports 2. The third parties are going to abandon this like has happened over and over and over again with Nintendo machines since the N64. It's a hot launch, well, not the N64,

but you get a good run in the first year or two, and then by the time you're ready for a new system, it is a drip feed of Nintendo-only stuff. And I'm like, that is what is going to happen. Not quite because third parties, I mean, a just dance just came out. for the we So it wasn't tough

But nonetheless It was the first article I ever wrote Where like the internet got mad at me And it was on Gaff and I'm like wow That's what it's like They call you a journalist in quotes No, that hadn't really started yet I was also like

I'm not a journal like Yeah Like Since you brought up the Wii sports too Like Do you remember We play I think it was And why everybody bought it?

It came with a Wii remote And those were hard to find too possible to find. Yeah. Well, that article I wrote was, like, the top seven Nintendo mistakes of history. Like, because we were also under an edict to write controversial things. Yes. And thankfully, I only had to do that for another year.

And then we found the real legs of the site, which I was much happier with about 08. But the number seven entry was the we because I'm like, I can't put it any higher because I don't know which way this thing's going to go. Like, it's going to be a success. But at what cost? Like, I feel like this is going to come back to bite them. And everybody's super hyped on it right now. But please try to imagine yourself two years from now when. We are three, four years into an Xbox and PlayStation world with HD everything,

and they're going to tap into these systems in ways we don't know yet, and the Wii is going to be this, like, GameCube Plus with Waggle that we're sick of. And I know that's going to happen, and it did, but at the time, it was like... How dare you? It was the most, how dare you, like, and everything else in the article was, like, you know, obvious things from the past that anyone could argue and whatever. But, I don't know, so it's just this, the whole year, first year of the Wii was like, highs and lows, highs and lows.

And any time there's an appointment, here comes to shovelware where it's like, this is a mini-game collection. And, like, you guys are going to, boy, Assassin's Creed looks kind of cool, I guess. And that's why, to this day, I've never played one. You're on Elf Bowling 3. I haven't played, like, any Assassin's Creed. I haven't played any Metal Gear since the first one. Wow. Because I'm like, I don't have any time.

Like, my professional life is, like, review and interview and preview all this Nintendo stuff, which is what I wanted. But I don't know. It was at least Prime 3. but at what cost. At what cost? Prime Free was great. I like Prime Free was great. I thought it was pretty interesting.

Like if you looked at kid-oriented media at the time, like even like daily newspaper comic strips, like the depiction of playing a video game changed dramatically. It was like kids now just standing in front of a TV waving wands around instead of sitting there with controllers. Or just an Atari joystick. Yeah, yeah. But I thought that was kind of significant and cool that it's like,

oh, yeah, this has become what a video game is in the minds of a lot of kids and adults. Yeah. I did want to go over some more launch stuff before we take our break. Just some notable titles. We went over the We Play thing. It was an okay collection of minigames. I think it was originally going to be the pack-in title. But there was some weird argument I didn't write down where Nintendo didn't want,

Wii Sports to be a pack-in. They wanted to sell it. It might have been in America-Japan conversation that eventually they buckled and put Wii Sports as the pack-in title. But of course, Twilight Princess was the killer app, although we were facing a very similar situation now with the Switch in which it's on both, and it's kind of identical. I mean, in this case, they mirrored it because they assumed everyone's going to be right-handed playing the game, so they need to make link right-handed.

It's an odd choice to me. I feel like it didn't really matter because it wasn't one-to-one. It was just like, I'm going to do, like, make the swinging motion. It doesn't matter what hand I'm using. But I felt pride. I felt like some shameful pride as like, well, I can't get a Wii, but at least I have the true Twilight Princess, the non-flipped one. The really valuable.

That's really, really worthwhile now. Oh, I sold it long ago. I'm sure the Wii U version of Breath of the Wild will do the same thing. That's what I'm going to play. So good. So we have Red Steel, of course. People seem to like it. Like you said, Red Steel, too, was much better.

But it was like the dark mature game for the Wii at lunch. I remember playing. I don't think I reviewed. that for some reason. It got farmed out to someone else. And I, when we tried to play it in the office, just to like verify the review,

it was like, is this on point? Let me play a few hours and just like nothing seems wildly off. And it was just like, I'm not, I don't like this at all. This is like,

I don't know. I guess some people must have enjoyed it. But yeah, I just remember like, again, when you're like side by side with like all these other launch games that are all shooters

and call duty, I guess that was three in 2006, which wasn't one of the better ones, but it was still just like, man, This is not competitive game I think though in that Wii bubble It's like you have to take me seriously now

Because I'm playing a violent game You know I've got a sword And that that was like the dream again Making the like lightsaber game For the Wii that never happened Because I think at this point We all hated Star Wars And we didn't want to hear about Star Wars for a while

So yeah And okay so other No everyone wanted that lightsaber game The Jar Jar Jar Disembowling game Yeah there were 22 launch games Which is so crazy to me Because you know launches are so small today But we also have WarioWare smooth moves, which was okay.

Not the best WarioWare game. I feel like that kind of team was moving on to Rhythm Heaven. I don't even know if this was the same team that did the old Warrior Wear games. It might not have been. I know Touched was not the Warrior Wear team. I'm not sure if this one was, but Twist is my favorite. And, yeah, so it was mostly about Zelda, even though it was a GameCube game. I'm guessing a lot of people didn't have a GameCube, much like a lot of people didn't have a Wii.

So they're going to just assume this is the game for this system. And one thing to talk about is the amount of screen shattering horror stories we heard all over the place. Even though every game started with a reminder, like, don't do this, don't stand by this, watch what you're doing, tether the thing to your wrist. And at Switch demos, they buckle that thing to your wrist because they don't want you to swing it across the room, break their TVs. But there were all these stories, of course, very sensationalistic in many cases like Nintendo was breaking your TVs. and they would eventually ship them with these Wii Mote condoms. Mine came with them. It wouldn't be long before that was standard.

And I've never hurled a Wii Mote controller despite never tethering it to my hand. I don't know about you guys, but it's just like, it's not hard to hold on to. That was one of those other indignities of time to go to my appointment. All right, suit me up. You can't shoot footage. They wouldn't let you point a camera, like trying to do, even Skyward Sword era in 2011, like trying to do a story about that at E3. And they're like, you cannot be in the shot. without this thing wrapped around your arm with a condom on.

Put this helmet on, Brett. Give me the Pentium dude astronaut suit. Like, whatever. Get your mouth guard in. Put the condom on it. I can't feel anything. Jeez. Tale is old as time.

So one thing I didn't want to talk about it, and it's kind of dark, but I feel like the story should get out in a way that it reflects reality. We have someone who died as a result of the Wii mania. And it was a contest held by a radio station. It was called The Hold Your Wee for a Wii contest. And this was just an example of gross negligence by this radio station. I feel like people do like to victim blame in cases like this. Like we saw a lot of that.

Like there is the infamous coffee story about McDonald's from the 90s where it's like if you hear what actually happened, you're like, the narrative I heard was a pro corporation, victim blaming, not reflecting the actual situation. Oh, this dumb ass spilled coffee on herself. And now everybody's got to, well, the coffee's going to be hot. But it was actually, you know, just negligence by a corporation. In this case, they were doing this content. where the people on this radio station would have to drink eight ounces of water every 10 minutes. And that's already dangerous. They did not consult any doctor.

I believe they might even call the doctor during the show. And then the doctor said, that's dangerous. And they were laughing. And they were laughing, like, what if somebody died? They were clearly just sort of making light of the situation they had no idea would actually kill someone. So things got deadly when they upped the intake by twice the amount because they're like, no one's going to actually have to pee before the show is over, so we need to make them drink more

water. And the woman, I don't know if she won or not, but she basically died when she got home. She was a mother of four, and it's a very sad story. I suggest you read about it if you have the wrong impression of it. But the husband was later awarded $17 million, and 10 radio

station employees were rightly fired. And I'll link to this in the blog post. I feel like the narrative again was like, oh, this dumbass drank too much water. Way to go, dumbass. But again, you're in that situation, you're trusting these authority figures. You're like, why would this radio station contest murder me?

You know, I would know at the top of my head like a lot of water, I mean, will kill me? Like, I thought our bodies are 98% water. This was the first point. A lot of people, including myself, knew that dying from drinking too much water was even possible. Yeah. It's such a, like, really?

I feel like I learned that too. But again, in such a short amount of time, like, I would think Like if I didn't pee for like days or something, like that would cause this awful backup. And that I can wrap my head around, but like a matter of hours, I guess, like I wouldn't, I wouldn't, off the top of my head, I wouldn't think that. It's called water intoxication. And again, it was, I mean, we see radio stations doing stupid, goofy pranks and this was not planned out. It was very manipulative and exploitive, taking advantage of the fact that people wanted a wee. And what makes it even like just so sad is that it's a young mother, I believe she was in her late 20s, like trying to get one for her family.

So I'm glad this resolved well. The husband got a settlement and people were fired. Do we know the animal theme names of the radio hosts? It was ding-dong and the badger. Out to murder single mothers. But yes, I will include a link to this on the blog. Sorry to go to a break on such a dark note, but hey, you know, justice was one and these people will probably never work again.

So we'll see you after the break. I'm going to go cry now. I'm going to be the I'm going to be. I'm going to You know, I'm going to be. So we're back, and we're back.

We have been talking about Wii sports on and off because you can't talk about Wii without talking about Wii sports because it's the game everybody played. And it's interesting to see how it was sort of the Super Mario Brothers for a new generation in that Super Mario Brothers was the game that we all played. It was like sort of this ubiquitous game. Everybody had it, everybody had it, of course, because it was a popular pack-in. We at least knew what it was. I looked up the stats on this, and again, this is sort of not a great comparison, but we-sports. Quote unquote sold 82.78 million copies versus Super Mario Brothers won 40.24 million copies. So almost twice as many people conceivably have played Wii Sports than Super Mario Brothers.

And I feel like, Jeremy is giving me a real hand gesture. They're real numbers. No, I mean, like that's not the number of people who played the game. Oh, no, I know that. But I mean, I feel like it would like for us, Mario was ubiquitous for people, you know, 20 or younger than us, maybe 15 years younger than us, that was their Mario. Like, that was the game everyone had played. It was the game everybody had, and you go to someone's house, and they would have Wii Sports

on the TV. I just feel like, it's strange to think of how this game we consider a keystone for our lives, or sorry, not a keystone, but a Touchstone. There you go. Is not as prolific, I guess, as Wii sports. Although, we're not counting on, like, virtual console sales. I'm not saying it's more important, but it's interesting just to see how wide the reach of the Wii wents and compared to things

that we think are pretty ubiquitous. Yeah, it's one of those things of like if you're died in the wool gamer for life, it's, there's something that you don't want to accept it when you hear the numbers involved. I'm like, no, no, no. Super Mario Brothers is definitely more important or whatever, but it's that same thing of

like with Capcom, it's like, oh, the best selling Capcom game of all time. Resident Evil 5. Oh, the one that, oh, the one that sucks and it's just terrible. It's like, oh. That's six, but yeah. I'm sorry. But it's just one of those things where when you hear it, you're like, how is Street Fighter 2? How is Mega Man 2?

How are these games, the ones that everyone still loves? How is that not the biggest one? And it's like, are you five? What? Yeah, if you want your, oh, sorry, Brett. Yeah, but then when you hear Wii Sports, you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, if you want your heart to be broken, think of a game you consider important, then look at what Nintendo dogs sold compared to it, and you will realize

your dreams are nothing. Your life is meaningless, your tastes are poor. Dogs are pretty great, though. Dogs are pretty great. I'm making for Nintendo Birds, though. That will never happen. So, more about Wii Sports. But you've got Yamamura in the Super Mario Maker.

Oh, you're right. Yeah, he's in that. Pigeon. Yeah. I forgot about that guy. So these were different mini-games split up between lots of different directors. Again, this is very much in the collaborative spirit of the Wii. And it was Miyamoto's idea to release it as a package rather than develop each sport as its own unique release,

which I think was key to this being the killer app of the Wii. It wasn't just bowling. It wasn't just tennis. I feel bowling was the most popular. one, no one really played boxing. They played it for like 30 seconds and they were like, this is too, I'm tired. This is too much. But yeah, Miyamoto's like, no, this will be a package.

And interestingly enough, golf is actually a best of, of the NES games courses, which Iwada himself programmed in the early 80s. Yeah, a lot of, um, a lot of the events in Wii sports are basically NES early black box

games. Yeah. So in a way this was kind of like the second coming of the NES, like this very casual, broad appeal, very, I don't want to say populist because that's become a dirty world. It was a hateful system. The white nationalist console.

No, it's it really felt like Nintendo looking back to the past. So, you know, we talk about, oh, it's not really a logical extension of what it'd come before, but in a way it was, it was just in a different way

of looking at things. And that was really central, to Nintendo's strategy with this. They talked about the Blue Ocean and everything, but the idea was to, you know,

they'd seen diminishing returns, Super N-E-S, to N-64, to GameCube, like playing by the same rules as everyone else, trying to outpower everyone else. They just couldn't do it. So they said, well, let's do it differently.

And with that and DS, they did a brilliant job. They kind of created their own monster because now mobile gaming has become even more appealing and casual and accessible and that's eaten their lunch. But, you know, for like five years in there, Nintendo really had something.

And, I mean, it goes without saying, though, but the key to the success was just the immediacy. It's, they're just translating the sport into a very reductive version that how to play it. You don't need really instructions. They give them to you. But it's just like, oh, I swing the bat. I swing the racket. I, you know, underhand the bowling ball. I punch, like I'm punching in a game, in like a real life.

In a real fight. Yeah, exactly. And to anyone who didn't play a game, like that, there was no intimidation, there was no, I'm going to look stupid, it was just like, oh, it's this easy. And I knew parents and grandparents and people who would never play a game outside of this playwee sports. It was very much a family event, this, this game, this phenomenon. And I think of like Nintendo, again, we're trapped in time, we're just after the Switch announcement, the Switch events. I'm thinking how they led with the One-Two Switch game. It feels very much like a kind of attempt to make a party game like this.

But again, it's not as immediate. It's like, oh, you all know how to play Kendo, right? Or, you know, you won't know how to milk a cow with L&R buttons, right? I feel like it's a little too high concept when compared to Wii Sports. It's also not as immediate in the, it's not a pack-in. Exactly. So you won't play it immediately when you open your system. You'll pay, you'll pay 50 bucks to play that party.

Yeah, you'd think if they're trying to, like, I mean, I guess the theory now is like, they're not trying to get those people. They're trying to get Nintendo fans and, like, to, you know, ignore everybody else. But it's like, if you were trying to replicate the Wii success, like, yeah, Nintendo fans aren't going to buy. I want to switch. No, they're not. Exactly.

Like, it's not for them and, or it's not for us, I should say, and it's like, you should just pack that in because it works so well in North America for a week sports. It should come pre-installed in the December. Yeah, yeah, and to ask. Take up most of it's 32 gigabytes. We're trapped in the past few people. But I do want to talk about the channels. It really feels like they were trying to embrace Web 2.0 with all these social functions that

weren't entirely functional. So we have the idea that, like, this will be a machine that every member of the family will check in with, even if they don't play games. So we have things like the news channel, the forecast channel. And this does feel like it was this one window of time before smartphones where this was novel. Like, a smartphone has replaced all this functionality. The iPhone would be a year from the Wii's launch, less than a year, actually. Not everyone had one, but eventually everyone would. And so some of the design ideas were like, so this.

The channels are displayed like TVs in a department store. Again, they're trying to make this a very familiar visual layout for people to not intimidate them. So some other channels we have the Wii Message Board and Calendar, which was okay. I mean, like, I liked how it would put what you're playing and, you know, how long you're playing it. I think if I go back to my Wii shell in my Wii U, I can go back to 2008 and see what I was playing on certain days still, which is neat to me. I can go back and see what I did. I was like Mario Galaxy nine hours or something. Wow, that's what I did that Saturday.

Well, even now, like, starting it up, like, I went back and played Skyward Sword for 20 minutes recently, and then, like, there's that little, you have a message that pops up and it's like, oh, you played Skyward Sword for 20 minutes today. Okay, great, thanks. Way to go, Chan. So, this is something they're actually doing with the Switch. So we have play history like we talked about. This was implemented so the game console would not seem like a hostile presence in the home. So a family member could conceivably keep track of. how long you're playing games, tell you not to play.

Iwado wanted to make the Wii so it would automatically shut down after a specified amount of time. But that would have caused too many problems with the software, with certain functions. And I believe they're doing that with the switch. Am I correct? I think that is a function of the switch. Yes, after two and a half hours, your battery dies. Yes, exactly. It automatically.

I think there's some video with Bowser and baby Bowser. I didn't watch it. I saw screenshots. But I think there's some sort of functionality where you, the parent, could be like no more video games. Boop, and it'll turn off or whatever. It looks like you can set. with it using a cell phone app, like, okay, he's only going to play for two hours.

It seems like a very outdated mindset, though, because, like, again, I'm only around, like, niece, nephew, and they're in that age range. I don't have kids of my own, but, like, everyone's on smartphones all the time. So the idea that, like, switch? Okay, I'll just go play with my iPhone. Yeah, it's like...

Yeah, and it's, like, the idea that, like, this kid's going to, I don't know that a kid's going to sit in front of a console tethered to a TV for more than an hour at a time, like, to a point where you need to turn it off. Like, they're raised on distraction, and different screens. That's true.

Distraction is now a reality. Yeah. But the idea that like stop playing that game, it's like, but everyone's on their phones. The parent is? And this isn't me like, kids today and our lives are going down the toilet because of technology. Like, not at all. It's just like that's how we all are. We're always looking at our phones.

The idea like, well, parents might want to turn it. Like, I don't think they will. That's a lot of micromanagement, I think. Yeah. It's like, okay, I'll just go talk to some pedophiles on Twitter. It's like, oh, back to my Snapchat. That's okay. I'll go post some pepe memes.

So one thing we did not talk about at all is the mees. These cartoon representations. I did talk about them. Okay, I'm sorry. I was not paying attention to the show I'm hosting. One quick thing about the channels, though. One channel that actually did get a lot of use, and it came out maybe a year after, was the Everybody Votes Channel.

Oh, yes. And it would just give you a binary, like, favorite thing, cat dog, favorite type of movie, this, that, or whatever. Pizza or cheeseburger. Yeah, and they would ask you. silly questions, but like every week we would sit down and be like, oh man, the results are in, and you could break it down by state

and be like, why did Wyoming, everyone loves hot dogs over hamburgers? Like, what a bunch of weirdos? But every week, there was some new yes, no question, and like, we use that for right up until they shut it down. Same here, yeah. It was one of the later channels they added maybe a year or two after, but it was interesting, and it was very, very, like,

frivolous, but who cares? It was just fun to participate in that. And the news thing I thought was cool, where you could change the view into a globe, and you could move the globe around, and the stories would stack on the country where they're from. That was awesome. And you could be like, oh, I don't even know what country that is. And there's a story.

Let me look. Oh, a bunch of people died. Yeah. It was weird to read about terrorist attacks using your Wii. Yeah. What happened in Yemeno? Oh, geez. So the Me Channel, of course, we're talking about the MES.

These are actually based on Kokeshi, which are cylindrical Japanese dolls with round heads. This idea was originally meant to encompass three games, but they eventually built it as a system function of the Wii. So I believe these are going to be game. Cube games based on this idea of you as an avatar doing things. Maybe it was sort of like Polygon Studio in the Mario Artist Suite for the N64 disc drive. This is

super deep, guys, so please look this up if you don't know what I'm talking about. But this would be ripped off by avatars, the Xbox. I don't know if those exist on the Xbox one. It's bad. I mean, Rare made it. You have to dig to find them, so my head-toe bomb man, Mega Man one outfit, dude, is still there. He probably paid for or was...

Oh, yep. And an animated Ed 209 from Robocop is somewhere in that Xbox 1. Didn't they make it so that a snapshot of your avatar is now like the default icon for your profile rather than like... As of the last time it was plugged in, yes.

Yeah, like I had all these icons for my 360 and it's like, nope, those are too small resolution. Yeah. Oh, so I got ahead of myself actually. So the idea of the me came from a prototype called stage debut and it was showed at a trade show but never turned into a full game. They couldn't think of what to do with created

characters after you created them. It was sort of like this thing called Talent Studio as part of that Mario Artist Suite I talked about. We never saw it here. Was it a disc drive? Originally, the Talent Studio thing was you taking a photo of your face and just smashing it against the me figurine, but they're like, that doesn't look good.

We don't want people putting their buttholes on MEEs or whatever. They did that anyway. What's that? They did that anyway. That's true. There's so many like anus faces and stuff like that. They got creative. Life finds away. Yes, you had to work for that. So, and then the Siwada asks, they spend an ungodly amount of time talking about the photo channel.

According to Ray Barnhold, retronauts, who comes on the show every now and then, apparently there was a real fascination in Japan with looking at photos on your TV. And if you remember those early PS3 units with every USB slot, every possible type of media slot, there is a photo card slot, whatever those are. What's the format? SD card slot? Yeah. There's like a big chip.

The CF card. Something like that. It wasn't SD, but it was specifically for photos. Yeah, like Compact Flash, the big square ones. Yeah, but I swear to God, they spend two to three pages talking about this photo channel in the UwadaS. So it was a big deal, but again, I have a smartphone. Photos are just like nothing anymore. I take photos of what I eat every day, basically.

So who cares? It's not like vacation photos are this big deal anymore. You just see them on Facebook every day now. So, yeah. So there's a few other things. dealing with channels. We have the Everybody Votes channel, which Brett talked about. Check me out, where you submitted Meese.

I think they were like, can you create this historical figure? And you could also download Mees. Of course, Hitler, Jesus, Hank Hill. The Hitler and Jesus were the two big ones. Yes. Lots of Hitler, lots of Jesus. And one thing I thought was a very novel was the YouTube channel. You could finally watch YouTube on your television.

This was before the PS3, before the Xbox had any apps like this. So I was watching like full mystery science theaters uploaded to YouTube on my my TV without having to, you know, tether my computer to it anymore. So that was pretty interesting, I thought. Please go and watch Game Boy World on Nintendo Wii, just to say you can do it. That's the best way. I think your hits count twice on that, if it's a Nintendo video. Man, if YouTube can to this day still detect when a Wii is loading it, I'll be,

you've earned that click. Jeez. So, of course, we have to talk about the Wii lifespan, and everyone will have different opinions on this, of course, but my perspective says that enthusiasm amongst quote-unquote gamers dried up shortly after Mario Galaxy launched. I feel like that was kind of the game we were waiting for. It wasn't Twilight Princess. It was an original game. It did

some cool things, but after that we're just kind of like, I'm done. I don't care anymore. What does everybody else think about this? My hypothesis. It continued to be my little buddy all the way through new Super Mario Brothers Wii. Yeah. Yeah. And something we haven't really talked about is

We Fit, which was a big, big deal. I was going to get to that actually, yes. But I mean, that gave the a lot of longevity. I started to make an effort to get into shape around the time that came out. And that was kind of my starting point. I eventually left it behind. But it was a good and like kind of a launch point for me to kind of think about how to be more fit, more active.

It was very much like brain age and that it was selling you a way to better yourself. And unlike brain age, this actually had, it actually worked. It wasn't just like pseudoscience or whatever. It actually had, you could actually work out with it. It could count your calories and it could actually get you moving. Yeah, and Christmas, I want to say like Christmas break 2008, my wife and her cousin and her, her cousin's boyfriend, we all just like sat around for weeks just like playing goofy Wii fit games, like the penguin game where you're on the icebergs trying to balance each other. Yeah, like it was very much the next step for Wii sports. It was very accessible.

And, you know, the balance board, I don't want to get too far ahead. Oh, don't worry about it. No, we could talk about this now. I mean, I feel like that was, that was a great interface concept because it was much more precise than the motion controls. And using your whole body to control stuff, like that was an idea that had been around in video games, you know, like the activator or whatever. But it never worked out, whereas this did. And it was very precise and would give you pretty good results on like your balance and doing yoga and stuff. but also for game purposes,

the way they integrated it with Punch Out was amazing. Yeah, that was... I never tried it with Punch Out. Yeah, I was when I reviewed Punch Out and, like, we made a little video where I'm like, I know no one's going to do this, but playing this game with the motion control standing on a balance board is physically demanding,

pretty responsive, and like, this is the real deal. This is something you've been promised for decades. As much of a fan of Punch Out as you are, Bob, I'm really surprised you haven't tried that. I never had a Wii Fit Board in my life. I have one under my couch. They can't be expensive now. No.

But I really think you should try it. I think you'd enjoy it. Interesting. I just assumed it wouldn't have worked. No, it's remarkably responsive, and it makes you feel like you're actually, like, not just sitting on a couch. Like, it's pretty cool. Yeah, I mean, well, so this was the, I feel like Nintendo was very smart in making this at the right time because, okay, so we have a lot of publicity about the Wii for non-gamers. It's on, like, morning shows, on Oprah and things like that. They're showing this off.

After that fades away, they have a new thing to bring around to people. people to show off like this lifestyle device like this will help you get in shape it's fun my mom bought one because of we fit my mom bought a we which is crazy to me to think about that the last time she played a game was on the n-s but she bought the we fit it was a big deal for them i mean they they flew us to new york to meet miamoto that was the first time i ever met shigura miamoto and uh my photo of myself standing with him at the and the we fit board was like where i said wow i'm really fat i need to lose weight did you give you like the thumbs down or whatever That's his new trademark.

Thumbs down to thumbs up. That was not, he wasn't into that yet. Okay, he wasn't, he wasn't, he wasn't foulized. He hasn't gone, he hasn't gone to gladiator style on that. So, it seems like a ton of deals were made when the Wii was at its biggest. And then all of these games came out when nobody cared. So I wrote down a few games, No More Heroes, Mad World, Castlevania Judgment, Epic Mickey, even Zeno Blade Chronicles. All of these games came out after the party had ended.

And I'm sure some of these sold well. But I think some of these went multi-platform, because they didn't hit the Wii when the Wii was huge. I think No More Heroes did pretty well. You did? Yeah, that was early on. The first one did. The second, maybe not so much.

But there seemed to be a lot of interest in that one. I remember, yeah, No More Heroes 1 and 2. I forget if I reviewed the first one. I'm pretty sure I reviewed the second one. Second you did. Yeah, that was like, at that point, like this is the only reason I'm coming back to and booting up my way. I did enjoy that game.

I just assumed that nobody cared at this point. By two, it was pretty late. Yeah. But there was, I mean, like I said, base extraction, but even things like Muramasa and I'm kind of I mean, Red Still too, like I've said, and over and over again, but there was always like every year, I mean, Tatsunoku

versus Capcom, like there was always something. Deadly creatures. Deadly creatures, even. It's like, uh, de Blob. Like, there was always something kind of cute and fun and neat. It was just so hard to get one, like, for us, traffic, for any kind of Wii review or Wii coverage by like 09 in 2010, anything after New Mario,

New Super Mario Brothers Wii. It was like, we had to like drum up like, what's an angle I can write about this review because no one's going to read the review. Yeah, even Mario Galaxy kind of was like a fart in church. Like, was it there? Did it happen? Yeah, and I would, you could argue

at most Mario Galaxy 2 was like the real, like, after this point, no further, because it launched against Red Dead Red Dead Redemption. Yes. I feel like a bad person, but I never really played Mario Galaxy 2. Oh my God, Jeremy. I played demos of it and I was like, oh, okay. I played it a little bit. Apparently it's much, much better than what I saw in the

You have to play it, Jeremy. You have to. I will. You have to play it. I will. I command it. On the switch, somehow. It's on Wii U for like 10 bucks.

I kind of feel like the drop-off was probably due to three things. Like, I think the PS3 and the 360 kind of pushed graphics a little bit further. And there's disillusionment with motion control, obviously. And also, I think, trophies and achievements might have played a pretty large part in it. You're really right about that. I don't know if we care any more, but we root. really care. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

We're much more excited about King Kong than they were about the... That average. A thousand points right there, hmm, baby. Yeah, well, but that was, like, it was such a weird thing, like, for the first time. I'm, like, I feel like I'm getting some sort of lasting reward for the time that I put into this. I remember the peak of that was, like, all of us at Radar, we're all friends on Xbox, and there'd be a point where there's 10 of us online right now, look at all the crap we're all playing. Like, we are all simultaneously, and I would, like, go to the guide, look at...

Oh, man, he just got 20 more. Okay, what can I get? And, like, just feverishly trying to get this fake score. Oh, everybody get Avatar. Yeah, but in 20 minutes. And then you would see we, like, try to play weird catch-up. Like, did Prime 3 have, like, fake achievements? And it's like, they don't display anywhere.

I think it might have sent a notification in that back-end calendar thing. Like, oh, your friend got this thing. And it's like... Oh, there's another game that did that. Conduit 2, I think. Yeah. And Bay and the 2 on the Wii does that as well. On the Wii, rather, does that too.

Because the Wii doesn't have achievements either. Yeah, so we talked about the Wii Motion Plus, which was all right. Skyward Sword, I don't care for the game. I thought the technology was pretty interesting and how they made that work. But I don't know if they could ever port that game again. Maybe it could be a Switch port. I assume the Switch can do the Wii Plus. Sorry, the Wii Plus stuff.

Yeah, yeah. I have to assume it can. So maybe we'll see that again. I don't ever want to play that game again. I'm sorry if you like it. But so we have some other things. I feel like this is the last real era where a single game. could vary between platforms.

So we saw a lot of unique Wii versions of games like Dead Rising Chop Till You Drop, Far Cry Primal, Ghostbusters. These were all unique Wii games. Those are some... That's quite a trio. Yes, I can't imagine what that Wii, Dead Rising looks like.

It can't be good. We played it, again, not that long ago. I remember when it showed up for review and I was like, oh boy. But I think we fired it up not that long ago. And even, especially now you're like, there are four zombies. There are six zombies in this mall and just the clip clop

of Frank's feet, like, it just was strange. Yeah. But, oh, sorry, Mike. And then the Wii Ghostbusters, since you mentioned it, like, I played that for Vitchie Game Apocalypse a while ago. And, like, it has completely different content. Yeah, yeah. The levels are complete, like, you go to a,

in the, the, quote-unquote, real one, you go into, like, an architecture firm and blow it up. And in the we version, you go into, like, a game design studio. And, like, there are all these game like pixel ghosts that attack you. Is there unique dialogue from the real Ghostbusters actors, too? Yeah, I believe there is.

Wow, okay, wow. I kind of want to hear that because it will never go anywhere else. That's where all the Bill Murray footage, they couldn't get to pay. Yeah, a lot of it is just repurpose dialogue, and then it's like they dice up the cutscenes so there's like slightly less suggestive dialogue or whatever a bit. Interesting. So we also have the final Wii RPGs, and these all were happening. happening when I moved out here in 2011 to work for one up.

And there was all of these hand-wringing articles like, oh, the JRP is dead. Oh, no, no more JRP's forever. And then all of these games eventually came out. The Xenoblade Chronicles, the Last Story, and Pandora's Tower. These all eventually made it out. I believe ZenoBlade and The Last Story were out in Europe before they were out here for a time. Indeed. In fact, we got the Zeno Blade localization from Europe.

Yes, that's right. Yeah, so these are all big games. I mean, last story was Sakaguchi, Final Fantasy Creators' last, like, true, real traditional RPG. It's a really good game, too. Almost like it was his final famous. Hey, that name has a lot to do with. I see. Man, wow, yeah, last story is totally the, God, what was the Shinji Mukami, Evil Within, Resident Evil.

Yeah, yeah. Anyway. But, yeah, I mean, these are all, I didn't play Pandora's Tower. Zendoblate obviously has legs now. I mean, they just showed at the Switch reveal, they showed the new sequel. it's going to be ZenoBlade 2. X was a Wii U game. So clearly this game did take off

after I believe it was like a 2011 or 2012 Wii release. These were all like 2011 or 2012. I believe they're all 2012. Yeah, and ZenoBlade came out on 3DS also. Yeah, that's right, yeah. Yeah, so yeah, I mean, I feel like these games, I'm just so glad they happened,

but I have to feel like all these deals were signed when they assumed that we would be on top forever because it takes a long time to make an RPG and just researching Xenoblade Chronicles, I think it was in production for like five or six years. It was in production for a long time. So even before the we released, I think.

And so these notes were written in November of 2016 back when we planned to record the show. But there are still new, we release is at least one new re-release. It's hard to say we release. We re-release. So Just Dance 2017 came out on October 25th of 2016. So, I mean, it feels weird to do a retronauts on a console that is still producing games. But like the PS2, it's taking this bastard a long time to die. But just dance 2017 is no persona for.

Well, it probably doesn't help that the Wii you did not exactly push the Wii out of the market. Yeah, that's true. Final questions. We're going to wrap up here. I want to know what everybody's favorite unsung Wii game. is. I'll go last because I tend to go first and take the best picks when I host a show. Let's start with Michael, if you're ready to jump in on this.

You know, I always kind of put on a pedestal Wario Land, shake it. I think it was. Like, that game just looked so amazing. I don't know, would you say boomblocks is unsung? That's strange, it has a strange Steven Spielberg connection,

correct? It got some hype, but I don't feel like a lot of people really played it. I played it, and then years later when Angry Birds took off, I'm like, why was Boomblocks not this? You know, why was not this popular? I played it, like, I got it, I remember when Circuit City died? Oh, yeah.

Yeah, I went and, like, made a big deal out of, like, everything is so cheap. I'm going to, like, spend $400 and get $2,000 worth of games and, like, went with this huge armload of things, and one of them was boom blocks. And so, like, I got seriously into it over, like, a weekend. Like, just

playing it for hours and hours and hours. And then, like, from all these, like, wrist snapping moves that I was doing, like, I built up this huge lump on the inside of my wrist. And, like, I went to a doctor and like, eh, it doesn't look like anything. It'll go away. That's the most severe case of bloom blocks wrists I've ever seen. Blumblocks? Boomblocks.

But, yeah, I haven't played it since then. It did damage you. I think our friend Chris Antista has serious nerve damage from playing Skyward Sword with the Wii Fit. Sorry, Wii U plus. God, Wii Motion Plus. Wait. Wii Motion Plus. God, it's, it's, I'm on.

Jumbled up here. Get your trademarks right, man. Yeah. I mean, I feel like I've said it over and over already with Red Steel, too. It's one of those, like, they announced it and everyone in the room, including myself, was like, what else you got? And then when it came out, I started doing the review, and I was like, this is really fun. And I haven't played it. I bet it was six years ago at this point, maybe seven.

But I had such a good time. And I remember, like, trying to, like, really sell it in the review, like, trying to make little video clips to really get across, how these prompts would come up and you'd get in a fight and there's six people surrounding you and all these little prompts would come up where you can use a sword to stab behind you, shoot someone, juggle someone in the air, leap up all from a first

person perspective, all with this motion plus and I was like, this is the game that I was promised all along and here it is and no one's paying attention or cares. Yeah, I never played it. I gave a thing probably a nine because I was like, I've had such a blast and it's like if you're reviewing this in the context of I'm a Wii owner and

haven't had a game in a year, like this is It's like an unmissable thing, and it just seems like nobody... Interesting, aside, if I can put on my Ubisoft promoter hat for a second here. That's a big hat, Michael. The lead guy on Red Steel, too, is Jason Vandenberg, who's also the creative director of For Honor, which comes out in February. Is he the guy in the kilts? Does that have motion control also? No, but he's...

Is he what, sorry? Is he the guy in the kilts that came out, in the big beard? He does have a big beard. I don't remember if he wore a kilt. Well, the game was announced there was just this big guy with, like, a kilts. I think, and he was just... It would have been him. With a sword, too.

It was interesting. Jeremy, how about you? I'm going to say, even though I haven't really played much of it, it's one of those that's been on my list of things to do. I would say bucket list, but this game didn't have a bucket. Breaking from series tradition, it's Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, the crystals bearer, which actually might be the last Akitoshi Kowazu game to have come to the U.S.

Huh. Oh, that's right. That was like the action RPG solo story-driven adventure with like this kind of like a sassy, sarcastic, dashing hero. And he has like the face tattoo that's a jewel is stuck in his face? Yeah. Like that was such a weird game that just, like, there was a lot of talk about it. And then it sort of came out over a Christmas holiday and just vanished.

It was 2008, 2009. I wrote about it. Yeah, I interviewed him about it. It was what I mean? It was interesting. You could play multiplayer. One person had the DS version. One person had the Wii version.

You could do multiplayer. No, no, you're thinking of rings of fake. Oh, you're right. Wow. This was not a traditional Crystal Chronicles game. I was always confused by these. This was like an action-driven, story-driven, more single-player kind of game. Wow, I never played this.

I think I should check it out. It's probably super cheap. I would recommend getting it. That's one thing we should point out. I think every Wii thing is really cheap right now. I've been scooping up. I think maybe like Xenoblate is expensive, but it's pretty hard to find an expensive game. Eventually, though.

Yeah, so grab up everything that you want to get right now while the getting's good. I don't know if Wii stuff will ever be as rare. as S&S games. But I feel like once people reach an age where they want to buy their childhoods back, that's when things are in price. And this is a million childhoods. Yes.

Or 100 million childhoods, sorry. Like a lot of childhoods. And it wasn't great, but the Lost in Shadow was just a really cute, like. I get that mixed up with Pandora's Tower of it. Yeah. I bought that for $10 and I still need to play it. It's totally fine. And I hear that kind of ruined Hudson, though,

spending a lot of money on that game. It's like the exact kind of game I love, though. It's like, here's one premise that we'll just iterate on as the game. Like, I love, it reminds me of an old, ES or Super NES game. Yeah, and we didn't really talk about Wiiware, which was kind of like the evil counterpart to virtual console. Yeah, they had like a whole like big like event, like in 09, maybe 08, 09 for like, here's the first batch of Wiiware like World of Goo and like they had some like big push. Lost wins, I think was one of the games, something like that.

Yeah, and it just kind of like. Yeah. Nintendo. Yeah, they really didn't push that as hard as they should have because there was some interesting stuff. I mean, there were the Konami rebirth games. The little king story. Yeah. And Mussel March.

Of course. There was like that Dragon Quest strategy game. Yeah, with the, yeah, that's interesting. My choice is actually a little king's story. It's on the PC now. I wrote about it for US Gamer. Please read my article there. I'll link to it.

I love that game. It's a mix of SimCity, Picman, and the Legend of Zelda. And it's really, really good. And then kind of in between your pick and mine, there was Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, My Life is a King. I think it's what Brett was talking about, the Wiiwear game. My Life is a King. And then there was also My Life as a Dark Lord as well.

I think I always meant your... Oh, Little King Story, yeah. That was a box game, though. Oh, it was. Okay, sorry. But that game is great. There's a PC port that some people had problems with. I didn't.

Your mileage may vary, but I love that game. It's so great. It's a little clunky, but it's got a great attitude. It's super subversive and has a really dark sense of humor. And it's super great. It has all these great systems, and I can't talk enough about it. There was also, like, a Vita version that came out, right? That is a sequel.

Is it a travesty. Yeah. It was not the same game. They remade everything. it made it sexier? I don't know why. Like, I want these wafoos to be sexy. But it was a really weird remake. I don't know who did that, but it's bad. So, final question for everybody. I know Brett's got to get out of here soon. How do we view the we in the context of gaming history? I don't really even really know what this question means, but I feel like it really brought people

back into games. I don't know if they stayed, but it made games less shameful. There's still that stigma attached to the games as much as I don't like it. It made people more accepting of games. Maybe they didn't come back, but I feel like it made games something everyone could do for a brief period of time, and that was so nice to see as games

are usually attached to the stigma of the basement nerd or whatever. I don't know if that will ever go away, but I feel like there was a brief period where it was like, no, no, we're all into games now. Anybody else jump in? Like, how do you feel the Wii fits into the context of gaming history? I mean, I feel like that's pretty

accurate, but for some reason when I think about we, it, for me, it's more about the DS and DS light. Like, it was this precursor to carrying a phone with you everywhere, touchscreen. Like, there were casual games for, like, anybody between brain age and, I mean, even visual novels, Ace Attorney, and all these things that brought tons of people in. And it also had some of the most hardcore games you can imagine between RPGs and strategy games and action adventure. Like, it had everything. And the Wii instead, like, had a really big boost right at the top of, like, we sports. Like, everybody can play this. It's in your parents' house.

It's in your house. It's in nursing homes. It's in schools. But outside of that game, it became, like, a stretch for them to keep people buying new software. Yeah, yeah. That's true. And then as the years went on, I just feel like the DS is the one I would, like, really put my, like, that's the machine that really made a big difference. Yeah, well, I feel like it removes some of the stigma by turning video games.

into like a brief of mainstream fad. Like the kind of people who get up to watch, you know, the Today Show. Yeah, that's right. You know, we're really into it for like a couple of years. And then like with any fad, they just sort of lost interest. And yeah, like you said, like I can't imagine that they really, unless they had kids, they probably weren't really motivated. Like, I'm going to buy more stuff beyond Wii Sports.

I should have looked up the sales for resort. Because like to me that was always like for the first few years, it was like whatever the sales of Wii Sports 2 are, That will prove or disprove my point that I was trying to make an 07, and I'm sure it did fine, but... I think it did pretty well. Yeah. Yeah. But I still remember the ad that was, like, in some store circular or whatever, like, Nintendo Wii, was it, turn off the TV and get off the couch and get active.

Like, turn off the TV? Wait a minute. How about you, Jeremy? What do you think? Yeah, I don't really have much to add. It's this sort of strange outlier in the normal history of video games, but... I guess we kind of need to see where Switch ends up to see what it means within Nintendo's legacy. Like, was it the last gasp of something that they were never able to grasp again?

Or was it just like a new business model for Nintendo that Wii U missed out on, but is going to be their thing going forward? Interesting. So that was our Wii episode. Hopefully we did it justice. I'm sure we'll do a GameCube one, a PS2 one. I want to hit all the big consoles. but the Wii was so unique. I have a soft spot in my heart for it.

I still have my Wii you hooked up just to play all my Wii games, all my virtual console games. So I feel like the Wii will never leave my home until the WiiU dies, and I hope that doesn't happen soon. But as for me, I've been your host, Bob Mackey. You can find me on Twitter as Bob Serbo. I also write for Something Awful.com and Phantom.com, which is my day job.

I read about video games over there. And my other podcast is Talking Simpsons. It's every Wednesday on the Laser Time Podcast Network. We're going through the Simpsons in chronological order. Every episode of our show is a day. different episode of The Simpsons. And by the time this launches, we should be in season five. So we've got almost 100 episodes for you to listen to.

So go to Talking Simpsons.com or look up Talking Simpsons in your podcast machine. And you'll find it. Everybody else. Jeremy, where can we find you? Here at Retronauts. That's where I am. I'm at Retron. You're in this room.

Hey, don't we have a Patreon? And you quit your damn job. I did. Yes. So we are now crowdfunded and ad-funded retronauts on Patreon. Also, GameSpite on Patreon. because I'm making my video as part of this project. You can find Retronauts on, you know, Twitter and Facebook and so on and so forth.

And you can find me on Twitter as GameSpite. Did I miss anything there? It's all pretty much the usual rigmarole. Patreon.com slash Retronauts. And there are incentives. And all of our show is funded because of you. So if you like the show, a buck or two a month, it would be great. Michael.

Well, I have a weekly podcast, part of the Lasertime Network, called Vigigame Apocalypse, which you can see our episodes on Viggaamapocalypse.com, and yes, Vigja is misspelled, V-I-D-J-A. You can also follow the show on Twitter at V-G Apocalypse, or you can follow me on Twitter at Wikiparas, and you can see some of the things that I write for Ubisoft at UbiBlog.com. Cool. And Brett. Yet another laser time plug here, but I'll start with VG Empire.

The game music podcast you've been doing for a few years, well, five years now, geez. VG Empire on Twitter just looks at various game soundtracks over the years. I think we just did a well, a wrap-up of the best stuff from 2016, so we had like Fury and Doom and a lot of the new stuff, but a lot of

classic games in there as well. As well as 302010 on 302010.net, which is a podcast that we started in 2016 that goes week by week, every week looking at that exact week 30 years ago, 20 years ago, and 10 years ago. So you hear each segment of 80, 97, 2007. The music, the movies, the number one song, the episode of Seinfeld that aired that week.

And just to always fun dating things like PS2, Rogue Galaxy, just turned 10 years old. Oh, wow. For the U.S. at least. And that was like the placebo for Final Fantasy 12. Yeah. Yep. So there's just always fun stuff like that, like when, you know, every week. And it's also really fun seeing what random things came out the same week.

Like, oh, did you know the Challenger exploded the same week as the Super Bowl shuffle happen? And you're like, hmm, what? That was disrespectful of them to shuffle so much. And then, like, also, but then in 97, or that was 86, 96, 96. But, yeah, 302010.net. It's one of my favorite shows that we do. I just love. It's great.

It is very much a, hey, remember. But it is something that kind of regardless of your age or interest of it, you don't have to be super into games or anything. It's like just, were you alive, then you probably have some kind of personal attachment to some decade. Yeah, cool. Thank you so much for joining us. We'll be back next week with a brand new episode.

See you then. Thank you. I'm going to be able to be.