Why Does Nintendo Hate Us?

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve long been a fan, but after so many years of accepting the quirks and shortcomings of Nintendo’s consoles I can’t help but feel like I’m being intentionally deprived of true excellence. As rich and as deep as their talent may be, they’re not giving us all of the things we want from our games.

Maybe it’s all a big joke. Perhaps, in a secret bunker hidden deep in the Japanese forest, Nintendo’s top brass horde away all of the features we long for and mock us as they play a photo-realistic version of Metroid Prime online with their friends in another totally secret bunker a few miles south. So far this is the most logical explanation I’ve been able to come up with.

If you don’t know what I’m going on about, here’s a quick rundown of my five biggest gripes with the Wii. And just to avoid starting a great philosophical debate, graphics aren’t going to factor in here.

1. Lack of DVD Playback.
Not a big deal for some people, sure, but since the Wii actually reads DVDs to play games, why the hell not implement a last-gen feature most people would just assume the system has? Seriously, I learned that the Wii doesn’t play DVDs by trying to play one of my own without even considering that it might not work. This wouldn’t bother me so much if I didn’t know that the capability is inherently present in the hardware and could be activated instantly with a system update. The feature is intentionally disabled.

2. Crippled Online Features
Nintendo wants you to play games together, in your living room, at a slumber party, drinking soda pop and getting all whacked out on Mike and Ike’s. This is Nintendo’s preference, so to hell with you if you might prefer playing the same multiplayer game with a friend a little further away. The token online features they’ve given us with a very short list of games for the Wii and the DS are designed not from the perspective of having fun, but of not getting child-molested, which is a noble goal and all but I’m not really sure how big the threat was, nor why people like myself who are willing to be molested can’t turn off these babysitter features.

3. Held-Back Content
Nintendo very openly delays releases in order to space them out and keep us wanting more. Not a big fan of that, but I get it. Where this becomes a problem for me is on the Virtual Console, because there are dozens of games I continue to patiently wait for while they poop out some of the worst titles ever released in their place. People who download from the VC know what they want, and for the most part they’ve played those games before, so there’s no real logic behind saving the classics for a rainy quarter. It’s almost insulting when you consider that VC games are simple ROM dumps and Nintendo could easily have everything in their library available by the end of the day if they felt like doing it.

4. 512MB of Flash Memory
Oh, fuck you. Seriously? My memory’s full, and the flash card I bought to triple my capacity will be soon enough. 512 megs is enough for game data, but you knew I was going to gobble up your delicious Virtual Console titles at the incredibly slow pace you allow me to and you just plain didn’t care. Now we’ve got WiiWare, and what do you expect me to do exactly? Get up and switch out my cards? I know you want me to lose weight with Wii Fit and the training stuff in Wii Sports, but getting off of the couch to manually insert downloadable content is where I draw the line. How hard would it really have been to include a couple gigs of memory in this thing? You could have done that and still made a profit without raising the price. You son of a bitch.

5. Flash 7
I know this isn’t technically Nintendo’s fault alone, but I suspect it’s something they could overcome for the good of us all if they cared to. Most websites require a higher version of Flash, and that problem will only become greater as time goes by, so we’re stuck with half of a feature on a steady decline. Come on, Nintendo, ask Adobe real, real nice if you can get a license for an updated Flash plugin, and if you have to throw a little money at them I won’t think any less of you. The mentality of, “eh, good enough,” isn’t making it easy to love you.

When all is said and done, none of these complaints make the Wii a bad console to own, but they do frustrate the hell out of me as a loyal consumer of Nintendo’s products. Sometimes it’s easy to explain why certain things are missing and begrudgingly accept those flaws, but in a few cases it really seems like they’re choosing to hold back just to be douchebags.

It’s not like this is a new trend, either. The GameCube had adorable minidiscs at the expense of capacity. The N64 opted to fight piracy in China over using the logical format of CDs. The NES and the SNES were both underpowered systems for their time, though not to the same degree as the Wii. Finally, the GameBoy’s monochrome screen may have made sense when it was released, to extend battery life, but there was really no reason for us to wait 10 years for a color upgrade.

I love you, Nintendo. Why do you hate me?

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