Wii Agree

I'm a Nintendo Kid. I remember the moment I saw a NES demo for the first time in a Toys R Us. My brother and I dragged our mom there to buy a new Atari game. And there it was. The Nintendo. The graphics were amazing compared to our stinky old bleep-bloop Atari. We begged for the upgrade and within a couple of months got it. The Atari was instantly relegated to a cardboard box.

There will always be a warm spot somewhere in my memory for the Nintendo brand-name because of those early gaming experiences with Kung Fu, Excitebike, Zelda, Super Mario Bros and the rest. Millions of us are pre-conditioned by our nostalgic feelings to support what Nintendo produces. But the fact is that Nintendo doesn't want us, their original fans. They want our kids and they want our parents, two groups who are either easy to please or have low skill-levels and expectations.

That's my core problem with Nintendo: It will not evolve and maturate with me. Like Michael Jackson, it refuses to grow up and with every generation looks more and more disturbing and unnatural as a result of its pathological pursuit of looking young to attract the young. I want my gaming to evolve and maturate with me. Nintendo has never offered that kind of long-term relationship and I gave up all hope long ago that they ever would.

In fact, it was plain that Nintendo was going to stick with the kids as early as the SNES. My younger brother bought that system while I hastily moved to the Sega Genesis. The divorce between Nintendo and its original fans was made permanent when Sony released its original Playstation. I scoffed at the Candyland Nintendo releases of the 90s. N64? Gamecube? It seemed as though the Gameboy was single-handedly keeping Nintendo afloat for a long time.

And now we have the Wii, which amounts to little more than last-gen hardware and an intriguing, motion-enabled controller. The thing's graphics are laughable compared to the XBOX and PS3. The game library is egregious in exactly the same way Nintendo libraries have always been (shovelware and licensed crap peppered with the odd Mario and Zelda release). Once again, Nintendo has chosen to pander to those who have the lowest standards and simplest demands out of their gaming experiences: The very young. Only this time, they've added another group: The very casual.

Whoop-de-fucking-do. Bully for them.

Meanwhile, we original Nintendo kids must continue to look elsewhere for the quenching of our maturated gaming desires. Thankfully there are excellent options out there, because Nintendo abandoned us a long time ago.