Let's talk about the Wii

So the Wii is a console that I see much maligned online. From complaints about waggle controls, ugly graphics and a library full of shovelware, I can only really put these down to ignorance. I personally feel the Wii is a great console with a wonderfully eclectic library of games that is fun to explore. It's a console that definitely has it's share of problems but doesn't negate the fact that it was a lot of fun to own.

Pre-Launch Hype!

At the time the Wii was announced Nintendo were bouncing back after a long losing streak. The N64 failed to perform and led to them giving away market dominance to newcomer Sony. The Gamecube had failed to perform as well managing to come in third place to the PS2 and another newcomer to the market, Microsoft and their XBox. Nintendo's only stronghold was the handheld market where they were unchallenged and had the insanely popular Pokemon. Sony however had entered the market with the PSP and even though Nintendo had eventually won out with innovation and a great library of games with the DS, they were in danger of losing that market to Sony.

However there was still a hunger for Nintendo games. The N64 and Gamecube failed to sell but did host some all time greats. It was rumoured that Nintendo was going to try and shake up the games industry like they did with the DS with a new project called revolution. We would get a glimpse of what nintendo were planning when they showed a strange remote control type controller off at E3 2005. We would get a better look at the console, controller and games at E3 2006. We also learned the name of the console, the Wii. There was plenty of sniggers and ridicule in the UK and Ireland due to its association with a… bodily emission. However Nintendo eventually proved that the name was a good choice as it became a household term. It took competitors by surprise as well. The 360 was too far along but microsoft would eventually try to capture some of the market with the Kinetic. Sony would shoehorn in motion controls into their controller but the shape of the controller meant they made no sense. They would try again later on with Playstation move which while technically superior was a bit of a flop.

There wasn't a whole lot of interest in the Wii until that E3. I put a preorder down after 2005 E3 a year before the launch and was told by Smyths staff I didn't need to bother as there weren't many pre-orders or interest. However the Wii caught the zeitgeist of gamers and the public. The motion control input was something genuinely new and exciting and the Wii was demonstrated on mainstream television where its mode of input was easy to understand even for someone not versed in videogame vocabulary and that found complicated console joypad interfaces intimidating. Come launch day there were massive queues and midnight launches while parents desperate to get their hands on one begged people in the queue to let them have theirs for stupid amounts of money. It had become the must have toy for Christmas 2006.

The Wii would launch a year after the XBox 360 and on the same day as the PS3 in the US, which had a disastrous start and launch in comparison. In Europe the delay to the PS3 launch meant the console launched 4 months before it and had the Christmas sales period to itself.

The Console

Before launch the power of the Wii was a big discussion point, especially when Ubisoft released target renders of their launch title Red Steel which would look nothing like the finished game.

The Wii has sometimes been compared to two Gamecubes strapped together and honestly that's not too far off the truth. The Wii basically used the same architecture as the Gamecube but the CPU and GPU clock speeds were nearly doubled and the RAM was now 88 MB instead of 42 MB. While the Gamecube was a very advanced system at the time the Wii ended up being extremely underpowered compared to the Xbox 360 and PS3. Both those machines were very modern with full pixel shader and HDR lighting support while the Wii had a more primitive shading model that could emulate pixel shading a bit. However it did have the Gamecube's volumetrically lit fur shader that wasn't supported by the PS360, so take that! There were two advantages to this approach. The Gamecube hardware and development tools were easily modified to the Wii and developers had praised how easy it was to develop for gamecube. On top of that, the system was fully backwards compatible with the gamecube. It could accept gamecube discs and a flap at the top on the console would reveal 4 gamecube ports and memory card slots.

The system came with 512 MB of internal storage that could be expanded with SD cards. This would be a bit of an issue as will be touched on later.

The disc drive was a DVD drive but the system did not have DVD video playback.

The Controller

The star of the show was the controller, the Wimote. The controller looked like a remote control, making it instantly familiar even to people that never used a game controller. The controller contained an array of gyroscopes and accelerometers that could measure motion, although in a rather crude manner. The Wiimote also contained an infrared camera that could pick up the infrared light array from a sensor bar that could sit above or below the TV. The wiimote also had a microphone built in that had some fun uses by many games. For some games the Wiimote could be turned on its side and be used in a way that resembled a NES gamepad. For more complex games, a Nunchuk attachment could be attached to the bottom of the Wiimote to pretty much give the system a control scheme that could easily replicate a modern dual stick set up. This nunchuk attachment also had it's own set of accelerometers and gyroscopes. Despite all these motion sensing hardware, the wiimote also included the last gen feature of rumble.

The wiimote could also accept other forms of input, with pro controllers and classic controllers being quite common for some games although annoyingly they had to be tethered to the wiimote even if it wasn't in use. A later add on 'Wiimotion plus' came out to improve the capabilities of the wiimote but I'll cover that later.

With the console's 4 wireless wiimotes and 4 gamecube ports, it made it the perfect machine for couch co-op. The set up meant that games could exceed 4 players (which I would have said exceeded the PS360 but I only recently learned the PS3 can support up to 7 controllers wirelessly). Personally my wii got an awful lot of use this way and was dragged to many PhD college parties for wii sports, mario kart etc. post pub matches, although by far the most popular was 5 player Bomberman 94.

The Wiimote was the systems USP. It was unintimidating, easy to understand a use and for more complex games, it was modular enough to fit the needs of controls in modern 3D games. However the real magic was allowing the Wii to infiltrate the demographic that normally wouldn't play videogames or hadn't played them for years. I think for many people, that first Christmas they got a Wii was the only time their whole family engaged with their favourite past time.

The UI

The Wii had a simple but slick UI. Apps were laid out as channels on the home screen which looked nice but got crowded when you had multiple apps installed. The thing that made the biggest wave was the Mii, customisable characters that could be made to look like friends and family or could be made to look like celebrities or other characters if you got very creative with the Mii builder functions. While the novelty wore off there was a lot of fun to be had from these initially. Microsoft would eventually copy these with their Avatar functions.

Nintendo would release multiple channels during the Wii's like. There was a weather channel, news channel, rate my Mii. Most where throw away but fun diversions rather than something you would use a lot. There was also a shop channel where you could purchase smaller games. The shop channel was fully intergrated into the UI unlike whatever frankenstein shop the PS3 used.

The absolute best thing about the channels was the music.

It wasn't all good. Nintendo were quite draconian in how they managed friend lists. Each user had to exchange friend codes and both had to be entered before it allowed you to interact. The system also lacked features like achievements. While Sony patched these in, the Wii UI was never patched with these features.

Just one thing to note is that for a short while the Wii was the system that Netflix was most watched on due to the proliferation of the console.

The Wii looks like ****!

The Wii didn't support HD resolutions. It supported RGB scart for top of the range 480i SD visuals and also supported 480p through component cables. At the time of launch this would have been acceptable due to the low adoption of HD displays. However those sets would drop in price massively in the next few months and lead to wide adoption. I have my Wii set up through component with a retrotink 2x and it looks gorgeous, far better than the PS2 since the GC supported Anti Aliasing although it definitely can't match a PS360 720p image. So why has it got such a bad reputation? The problem with the Wii was that most people only used the pack in composite (red, white and yellow) cables which give extremely poor SD visuals. RGB and Component cables really improve the output massively, but there was also an issue with these not being available at launch, in Ireland at least. It's a shame the console was mostly played on composite because it could produce some nice visuals.

A funny quirk of the Wii console is that it supports the output of the same resolutions as the NES and SNES. This was implemented to make sure that the presentation of classic games through the virtual console was second to none and didn't introduce artifacts like pixel doubling.

The Virtual Console

Nintendo had a similar plan for the Wii to what Sony planned with the PS3, they wanted to create a console that was fully backwards compatible with previous generations of nintendo consoles. This lead to the Virtual Console which would offer games from Nintendo consoles from the NES to N64. Not only that but other companies would offer games such as the Megadrive and Turbografx-16. During the lifecycle of the Wii many other systems were added, from arcade games, to Commodore 64 for a while. Unfortunately some systems like the MSX were locked to Japan.

Games were made with an emulation wrapper meaning all games had emulation tailored to that game. This lead to quite accurate emulation. Along with the SD resolutions available it meant that emulation on the system was usually high quality. Megadrive emulation even exceeded Nintendo as Sega enlisted emulation experts M2 to program all Sega VC releases.

Games slowly trickled on to the service, much to the ire of many people who expected the entire library of consoles to be available on day 1. However looking back in retrospect, the Wii virtual console library is one of the greatest collections of old videogames we have seen and the emulation was far better than even modern Nintendo efforts. The Virtual console also saw the release of many japanese only games that normally sold for prohibitively expensive prices on the market.

Online functionality

The Wii's online functionality was quite spotty. I've covered the UI and shop elements but games were handled by gamespy servers and performance was mixed. Some games worked well but others really highlighted developers lack of experience such as Nintendo themselves and how bad the likes of Smash Bros. Brawl lagged. Some developers did work wonders with the Call of Duty 4 port working exceptionally well. However when gamespy decided to shut down their servers they took the whole Wii online ecosystem down with it.

The Wii also had a function called Wiiconnect24 that kept your will in a stand by state but connected. It was a bit of a disaster because it would just make the wii disc drive glow bright blue when there was an update to anything (there were always updates), and also caused wii systems to overheat.

One other important thing to note is that the Wii was quite behind on modern trends and therefore while the firmware could be updated, games could not.

Later Revisions

The Wii would get later revisions that all just made the system worse. The first major revision removed Gamecube backwards compatibility and the associated ports. The next major revision was the Wii mini which was a complete POS. Gamecube support was gone but they also removed the SD card, wifi, and it only supported composite video out.

The Launch

The launch of the Wii in November 2006 was crazy. The entire shipment had sold out in every territory and there would be shortages of the console for months. Shortages would continue for Christmas 2008.

In terms of games available at launch, the Wii had some pretty good stuff along with some crap.

Wii Sports

The standout release was this pack in game. A simple collection of 5 sports titles, it demonstrated what the Wiimote could (and couldn't) do. It was a fantastic multiplayer game and became a cultural phenomenon for a while (and on youtube where there were many TVs broken).

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess

The biggest release for core gamers. Although this was just a Gamecube port, it played better on wii with the wiimote aiming being very intuitive and motion controls for the sword worked quite well even if it wasn't the 1 to 1 controls people were expecting. While the game isn't as fondly remembered these days I remember enjoying it a lot even if it felt quite derivative. It was also nice to get a massive Zelda game at launch especially when the launch drought was about to begin.

Rayman Raving Rabbids

The biggest surprise at launch. A surprisingly fun and amusing party game.

Now for the stinkers I can remember.

Call of Duty 3 launched on the system and barely worked with wiimote controls completely cutting out when things became hectic.

Wii Play was meant to show people how to use the wiimote. It came with a wiimote but cost 10 euro more than a wiimote on its own. Seemed like a bargain but it was poo.

Red Steel was a ubisoft FPS that promised gorgeous visuals from the earlier target renders but looked very rough. It also featured first person sword play which was very simple and far from the 1 to 1 movement people were expecting.

Now lets get into some:

Nintendo Bullshit 1: Region locking

Unlike the PS3 and 360, Nintendo decided to keep the Wii completely locked down by region. This would cause frustration with delays of months between big releases or just plain missing out on game altogether. It was even more frustrating as the industry was moving towards simultaneous release dates.

As a result Europe would miss out on two launch titles, Excitetruck and Elebits/Eledees that while not amazing where interesting and fun.

Nintendo Bullshit 2: F*ck you Europe (50 Hz nonsense)

European games slowed down to 50 Hz were a thing of the past on the PS360 since all HD TVs operated at 60 Hz, the SD nature of the Wii meant that while it supported 60 Hz, some lazy developers ruined a lot of European games by releasing them only in 50Hz.

Launch window (2006-2007)

The drought begins. Following the Wii's release, good releases for the next year were few and far between. People really wanted good software for their Wii but it started to gather dust for a lot of people. While the first 2 thirds of the year were slim pickings, it really picked up towards the end of the year with some incredible releases.

Notable releases;

Warioware Smooth Moves;

should have been a homerun for Nintendo. The series had delighted with two excellent GBA titles and a DS game. It seemed tailor made for the wiimote but what we got just felt a bit dull.

Sonic and Secret Rings;

was a 3D auto runner for the Wii that was fine but I feel this one only did well because people were starved for games on the system.

Super Paper Mario

I feel is a pretty good game with some humour dialogue that disappointed people as it was more an action puzzle game than the JRPG people expected from the series.

Mario Strikers Charged;

was a fun arcade football game that was a follow up to a Gamecube game that was considered a hidden gem. This game was important as it was the first Wii game to support online play.

Metroid Prime 3: Corruption;

was the big game everyone was looking forward to. The previous 2 Gamecube games were absolute classics, and while 3 didn't quite match them it was still a damn fine game with excellent use of the motion controls and pointer.

Carnival Games;

is not noteworthy for being a good game but noteworthy for being the poster child for all the so called shovelware games. This game sold millions despite it's awful quality and it resonated with parents buying a Wii for their children.

Ghost Squad;

was one of the first conversions of one of Sega's lightgun games to the Wii. This was a genre that would soon become extinct due to its reliance on CRT technology but the Wiimote's pointer interface was a good substitute.

Zack and Wiki;

was a big sleeper hit. A funny quirky point and click game from Capcom.

Super Mario Galaxy;

came at the end of the year and pretty much blew everyone away. This was is quite simply incredible and would probably be the best 3D platformer of all time if not for its sequel. The end of the year would see some great releases for the Wii.

Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games;

is a decent enough game but more noteworthy for being the first time Sonic and Mario were in a game together.

Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles;

took some of the set pieces from your favourite Resi games and turned them into an excellent light gun game. This was a huge amount of fun and looked excellent.

2007 had a pretty miserable start for a Wii owner. Releases were thin on the ground with some major disappointments. I ended up picking up a few mediocre games as I was desperate for anything to play on the Wii. Also people were getting hungry for more adult games on the Wii. At least the end of the year had some really great stuff with Super Mario Galaxy being an all time great, Metroid Prime 3 finally coming out and being worth the wait (it was meant to be a launch title). Zack and Wiki and Umbrella Chronicles were nice surprises

2008 was shaping up to be a much more exciting year. More publishers were seeing the incredible numbers of Wii consoles sold and the potential to sell games to all those customers.

2008

This would be a pretty big year for the Wii. It would see some massive releases for Nintendo as well as the introduction of a new peripheral. It would also see the introduction of Wiiware. While Microsoft predicted the rise of Indie games, both Nintendo and Sony seemed to have been blindsided by their explosion in popularity. Sony for their part at least had the infrastructure in place to pivot and react to it but Nintendo didn't and were slower to respond.

Wiiware was Nintendo's place for indie games but it ran into problems quickly. The Wii's paltry 512 MB of internal storage severely limited the amount of games you could have on the system. Even using a SD expansion meant you just stored the games on the SD card and had to move games between the card and internal memory to play them. Nintendo had a strict limit on the size of games on wiiware which proved very restrictive. If you want to know why those telltale Monkey Island and Sam and Max games look so bad, it's because they had to fit within this wiiware limit. Indie developers also noticed that they weren't receiving any money for their games. On investigating it was found that nintendo would hold all profits from a game until it had made an arbitrary profit before releasing them, something like $50k which was kind of ridiculous. The audience just wasn't there either, they just weren't interested in indie games on the Wii or weren't computer literate enough to find them on the store or know or have the means to buy them. It was always there but fizzled out fast. There was some good stuff on there, the art.style and bit.trip games being some of the highlights.

Nintendo would face one massive difficulty this year, piracy. A hack was found in the Nintendo operating system that allowed full access to the kernal and encryption keys. This leg to the Twilight hack using Twilight Princess (which was quite weird, you' open a corrupt savem load it and walk backwards to activate it). Nintendo would patch out this hack but as the kernal and encryption was exposed the cat was out of the bag. Wii hacking and piracy was going nowhere. There were some legit uses for this hack. Datel sold the Freeloader disc that allowed the user to load a Wii game from any region. The disc became useless after the exploit was patched but it did mean I got to play Smash Bros a few months early and uncensored No More Heroes using US copies. The homebrew channel became a staple of a lot of Wii users and while it could be used for piracy there was some neat things you could use it for, like emulation and a brilliant source port of Quake.

Anyway, on to the standout games.

No More Heroes

I feel was a case of right game at the right time. It was, and possibly still is, Suda 51's most successful game. NMH probably shouldn't have been the success it was, being very much an art house game that made fun of triple A games by highlighting how boring they are and also took swipes at incel videogame nerds. It did help that it was an awful lot of fun and made great use of the Wiimotes features. At the time of release people were crying out for more adult games for the wii and the over the top gore of NMH caught peoples attention. There was a problem though. Gore was only present in the US version, the japanese version was censored due to japan cracking down on violent games and in Europe because ubisoft wanted to release it in Germany. While this didn't ruin the game something was definitely lost without the comedy blood. I'd definitely recommend checking this game out since it's easy to access on modern systems even if it loses a bit without the wiimote.

Endless Ocean;

is a scuba diving sim that might be one of the most relaxing games you will ever play. A great game to sit back and chill out to since there's no pressure to complete objectives. It's a lot better than

Opoona;

is one of my favourite Wii JRPGs. You play as an alien child separated from your family when they crash land on a planet. You have to explore the planet and look for your family. What makes this game so good is the exquisite world building where talking to the NPCs and finding out more about this strange new world is part of the fun. The soundtrack is also incredible and worth checking out.

Fire Emblem Radiant Dawn;

feels like it was meant to be an Gamecube game before switching to the Wii. Fire Emblem on became massive with the release of Awakening on the 3DS. Before that the only releases were two GBA games and a Gamecube game which hardly set the charts on fire despite their quality. Radiant Dawn is a follow up the Gamecube game and like that game it was ignored and now has become one of the most expensive and sought after games on the system now that Fire Emblem has finally found an audience. It's apparently a fantastic and very challenging SRPG that is well regarded by series fans

Wii Fit;

would become a massive hit for Nintendo and introduce the Balance boards add on. I'm not sure many people that played videogames were interested in this but it was genuinely an excellent fitness tool and had some fun balance based games on the Disc. A Wii Fit Plus expansion would be released later but I imagine a lot of these balance boards were left gathering dust along with peoples aspirations to get fit by the time it arrived.

Super Smash Bros Brawl;

had a serious amount of hype before release. Every few days new stages and characters were announced. People were getting excited about some of the deep cuts that were shown as new characters. Then Sonic was revealed and people went crazy. But not as crazy as when Solid Snake was revealed. Smash was a massive release for the Wii. It had by far the most content of any smash game. All Melee content was included. There was even a really good single player mode that was worth playing through. While the game was a great casual multiplayer game, for some reason Nintendo did not like Smash being played competitively so purposefully nerfed it for competitive play. Every attack now had a 1/100 chance of causing the player to trip. As a result it was deeply unpopular with tournament players.

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King;

was a Wiiware launch title. An addictive city builder that had you play a king sending RPG parties out to complete missions for you. I got heavily addicted to this one although it got old towards the end, although that end was about 25 hours in.

Lost Winds;

was another wiiware launch title. A fun platformer from David Braben (or Elite fame) and his new studio, it had you control the wind with the wiimote. A fun platformer that got a sequel and both are available on steam.

Space Invaders Get Even;

was a weird experiment for wiiware. The initial purchase got you the first few levels of the game with the rest of the game sold as DLC. With all the DLC it brought the price to the same as a full price game but there was also a full priced game's worth of content here. This was a really fun, unique game that had you destroy cities and earthlings as the titular bad guy space invaders.

Mario Kart Wii;

another massive Nintendo release but this one was a massive disappointment. The more open tracks were boring, the new motorbikes were OP as they gave you infinite dash and the motion controls were a little finnicky and no option to just use a controller. By far and away the worst of the Mario Kart games.

Boom Blox;

a game from the mind of Steven Spielberg! Boom Blox is essentially digital Jenga and a massive amount of fun as a multiplayer game. Highly recommended.

Shiren the Wanderer;

was the third game in the Shiren series. Sega tried to make Shiren a thing in the west with the release of this game on the Wii and the remake of the original on the DS. Despite these being 2 of the best games ever made, the world just wasn't ready for rogue-likes. A shame. This one never made it to Europe, although there is a US release.

Wario Land Shake it;

might be one of the best looking 2D games on the system. The animation was created by Production IG (who made Ghost in the Shell and the anime sections of Kill Bill). The game's central gimmick of shaking everything grows old before the end of the game and it just isn't as clever as the Gameboy titles.

Captain Rainbow;

is a strange adventure game about helping out Nintendo's forgotten, neglected and washed up characters that never made it out of Japan. There's been an attempt to fan translate the game but it was never finished

De Blob;

is a 3D platformer from THQ, which should set alarm bells off but it's actually really good. You play a blob that must colour in the world touching the colourless grey landscape. It plays better than it sounds with some fun parkour movement. Multiplayer is really fun and plays a bit like the tagging battles in Tony Hawks. This is another game that's easy to find on modern platforms.

Disaster Day of Crisis;

seems to have had a troubled development. It was shown before the Wii launch before disappearing. Then it released out of no where in Japan and bafflingly made it to Europe but not the US. It's the first game by Monolith Soft after being bought out by Nintendo. This genre hopping game was a big departure for the company that had previously made deep JRPG games. The game is worth playing for just how over the top and bombastic the whole thing is. A bad start for Monolith Soft but they would eventually create something wonderful.

Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces;

is an aerial combat game based on an anime that is far better than it should be because it was developed but the Ace Combat team. It plays just like Ace Combat and is therefore excellent.

Wii Music;

was a big misstep for Nintendo and would be more well known for coming up constantly in internet conversations by Nintendo haters when they wanted to prove how awful Nintendo was and especially Shigeru Miyamoto (who had no part in the development but appeared in promotional material, but the truth doesn't work against morons as we discovered a few days ago). Wi Music wasn't a great game but it was also more for very young children. Nintendo went hard marketing this game but it kind of did more damage to their reputation and ended up a massive flop, the market for the game wasn't there and it just gave the internet trolls ammunition.

2009

Another big year for the Wii with some great releases and a new add on, the Wiimotion plus.

By this time it was quite clear that the Wiimote wasn't offering the 1 to 1 control people had imagined. In most games a shake of the wiimote just replaced a function that could have been carried out by a button. It lead to wii games and controls being given the derogatory label of "waggle controls". Honestly, while some games made great use of the wiimote there was a lot of truth to this statement. The Wiimote could only measure orientation and speed, it's could measure spatial position.

Wiimotionplus was a dongle that sat at the end of the wiimote add added much better motion sensing capability. It was quite impressive technology and finally brought the 1 to 1 control that the Wii really should have had in the first place. Future Wiimotes would have this functionality built in.

Unfortunately, being an add-on, the wiimotion plus had limited penetration and most games that relied on this feature flopped. Skyward Sword was the only successful game that relied on the technology but it had to come bundled with a wiimotion plus wiimote to ensure all players had a compatible controller.

Now to the games:

Wii Sports Resort;

was game used to sell the Wiimotion plus. It followed on from wii sports, offering new sports events to compete in. It was another great party game and made great use of the wiimotion plus add on.

Little King's Story;

is a quirky game that plays quite like Pikmin. AS king you gather up a horde of citizens and use the to build or battle for you. Hard to describe this one but a modern port is available on PC

Gradius ReBirth/Contra Rebirth/Castlevania the Adventure Rebirth

Konami would enlist M2 to create new 2D entries in the Gradius, Contra and Castlevania brands for Wiiware. All three of these games are incredible but unfortunately are trapped on Wiiware and no longer available.

The Conduit;

was much hyped before release as bringing FPS to the Wii with PS360 level graphical fidelity. While the game looked impressive, it was a fairly mundane shooter.

Dead Space: Extraction;

is a Dead Space prequel and plays like an on the rails shooter. And it's really great, making good use of the wiimote. This made its way to the PS3 and works great with the Move but was on the Wii first.

Madworld;

is an ultra stylish, ultra violent and ultra vulgar action games from Platinum. It's not their best game but the visuals and violence really carried it as well as the very un-PC announcers. The european release was unfortunately ruined by a 50 Hz conversion. Fun Fact: this game was written by Yasumi Matsuno, who normally makes deeply political strategy RPGs.

Final Fantasy IV: The After Years;

is a sequel to fan favourite FFIV that had previously been released episodically on japanese feature phones but was made available in english for the first time on Wiiware. A fun if flawed JRPG that was released episodically.

Muramasa: The Demon Blade;

saw Vanillaware take their brand of absolutely gorgeous 2D artwork to the Wii. This is an absolutely stunning action game set in feudal Japan. I'd recommend the Vita version over the Wii game as it added some new DLC missions not present in the Wii release.

Punch-Out!!

What do you do when you are tasked with creating a remake of one of the greatest games of all time? If you are clever like Next Level games, you change as little as possible. This remake takes the NES original, adds some gorgeous new 3D artwork and then keeps the controls and enemy AI many the same as the original game. Why change perfection? A wonderful remake of one of my favourite games.

A Boy and His Blob;

is a gorgeous update of a NES classic by WayForward. A fun puzzle platformer with some great visuals and a button dedicated to hugging for maximum cuteness.

Sin & Punishment: Star Successor;

might just be the best game on the Wii. A follow up to the incredible N64 game, this is one of the last games from legendary developer Treasure. The game is a rail shooter that manages to switch genres constantly. The game takes you through some of the most insane set piece battles and bosses you will ever see. It's fun to pick up and deeply rewarding with some complex mechanics to discover. This game is unfairly ignored despite a worldwide release but don't sleep on it, it's incredible.

New Super Mario Bros. Wii

I don't think anyone expected much from this game. We all laughed when Reggie Fils-Aime said it would outsell Modern Warfare 2. The first NSMB on the DS was one of Nintendo's dullest games to look at laziest games in terms of level and game design, it felt like an also ran like Crash Bandicoot. I remember being tasked with reviewing this and sitting down to tear it apart. I ended up adoring it. While the NSMB art style is dull the level design was constantly inventive and fun. The four player mode was infuriating but also a blast. It was the best traditional mario game since super mario world. On release it didn't outsell MW2 but the game was a constant big seller for years and maintained it's full price, much to the announce to some people looking for a bargain. In the end it did indeed outsell MW2.

Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles

More resident Evil light gun action!

Silent Hill: Shattered Memories

A Silent Hill game made for the Wii, although it was eventually released for the PS2 and PSP. It's best on Wii however. This was the best western developed Silent Hill until the recent SH2 remake. It was pitched as reimagining of the first game. Interestingly the game would feature no combat and the player was to avoid all encounters. It made great use of the wiimote microphone and the pointer function for the protagonists torch.