The rest of the Wii’s life was pretty much Nintendo admitting that they didn’t give one fuck about me or any of their other longtime fans, so I repay them in kind by not giving one fuck about the Wii U.

@Matt: Yeah, I didn’t really mention the PS2/1 classics on the PS3, nor did I even mention that the Wii is fully GameCube backward compatible. This gen was really an amazing time for “classic” gaming, both because the consoles all featured some form of hardware based backward compatibility and downloadable classics. The previous gen had no downloadables and the following gen won’t feature hardware backward compatibility on the Xbone or PS4. It was a weird time where the industry wasn’t sure they wanted to use older games as a value proposition or as a revenue source, as indicated by Sony’s flip flop on PS2 compatibility on their PS3s.

The Virtual Console (and to a somewhat lesser degree PS1/2 Classics) was perhaps my favorite part about this last generation. The ability to have a plethora of classic games all easily accessible and controlled wirelessly has been a hoot. There just should have been more of them and cost less. With the addition of just a handful of extra VC games instead of some of the crap that got on there, it would have been the penultimate Nintendo console encompassing all that came before it.

While I haven’t gotten far into Skyward Sword or Xenoblade Chronicles, I did have a wonderful time with the Mario Galaxy’s, NSMBW, SSBB, Bit Trip saga, and Last Story, plus some decent others. Those are my kind of games though, and if you weren’t into those it would have easily been a crap system due to its myopic scope. As far as RPG’s go, the Wii was certainly the best Nintendo console since SNES, although it was only a few…

I guess the more I think about it, the more the more confusing the Wii was. For every good point it has one or two bad ones. While I liked the classic controller a lot, its familiarity to the SNES is a mixed blessing, and the nunchuck and remote were not good. While I liked a bunch of games, they were not really an enhancement of the Gamecube, nor were there more than a few real classics (and your mileage may vary on which few). Playing VC games was great except plugging your classic controller into a remote which ran on batteries was awkward to say the least. Navigating Netflix on that controller by pointing it at the sensor bar was frustrating. Everything would just have been so much easier and better, in my opinion, if it was all on the PS3, but they did take a risk and carve a place for the system by making it a casual/parents’ system with motion controls. Yet the Wii did carve a place in my life and brought me back into gaming after a time I thought I was done with it.

And while I didn’t like Twilight Princess very much, I had more fun with it, I’m sure, by playing the Gamecube version.