TWIFY: Nintendo

BWUH? How could I possibly be upset at Nintendo after the announcements they made on Tuesday? Well the truth is, I have been upset at Nintendo for a while now, the announcements that they made just set me off. So yet again one simple thing that most people have no problem with sends me into a rage and I come here to share my anger with you, dear readers.

Watching the announcements, I just saw a whole lot of “meh”. There was really nothing they said that made me think “Holy fucking shit I must have one of these!!1!eleven!” I have a Wii and a 3DS. Do you know what they get used for? Netflix and DS games, respectively. No, seriously, I have games for my Wii (Twilight Princess, Punch-Out, Mario Kart Wii, Mario Galaxy, and some others) but I don’t play them. We just use it to watch Netflix in the living room. And even though I have a 3DS, I didn’t find out until after I bought it that I am one of those poor saps that can’t see 3D effects ((hooray for astigmatisms!), so the biggest gimmick feature of the system doesn’t mean anything to me (although I am super-excited to see what the mod community does with it). Seeing their announcements didn’t even register a blip, and that’s sad because I love Nintendo. Don’t believe me? That picture up there is a shot of my desk at work. That’s just a tiny little portion of my Nintendo/Mario paraphernalia because it’s the only stuff that I have at work. I’ve got shirts, consoles, games, games, more games, toys, fleece pajama sets covered in Mario’s face, lunch boxes, magnets, a belt buckle shaped like an old NES controller… We have ferrets named Link and Zelda. I had a Siberian husky named Samus. I love Nintendo, but I feel nothing for these E3 announcements.

Maybe I’m just sick of seeing them regurgitate the same games every year. “Well E3 is here. What’s Nintendo got? Oh, the games I stopped playing 10 years ago but with a higher resolution and pocket-sized.” The sad part about that last sentence is that it doesn’t only apply to this year’s E3. Go back a few years and you’ll see it fits there, too. I understand that they have a large stable of popular characters and that you want to go with what works, but everything gets stale after a while no matter how much Febreeze and glitter you throw at it. Mario has been slogging through sewer pipes, battling dragons, getting blue shells jammed up his ass for as long as I have been alive. Let the poor bastard retire already. Give him a nice castle off in some far-off corner of the Mushroom Kingdom to live out the rest of his days completely worry-free. I don’t think that’s too much to ask, do you? How many times has he saved Peach, anyway? All he’s ever gotten in return is a single kiss (Super Mario RPG, and only if you performed a specific sequence of actions during the church scene) and a cake (Super Mario 64). That’s it? Even if peach is a total prude, she could have at least hooked Mario up with a date with one of her slutty friends.

The giant touchscreen controller was the only thing that got a reaction out of me. And it wasn’t the “AMAZING!” reaction that everyone in the audience seemed to have. Mine was more like “Are you fucking kidding me?” I know, it’s a mini tablet and it has video chat and I can check facespace and it’s a controller and it will make waffles and pass out blowjobs and all of the other wonderful things you could want from a gadget. But I don’t want that. I want to control my games. Even the novelty of the motion controllers on the current Wii got old after a few weeks. And how unwieldy do you think that thing is? People bitched about the Gen1 Xbox controller, but this is okay? Of course, I knew people that played FF11 with one of these monstrosities, so it’s an improvement over that… I guess.

If I am going to drop a few hundred dollars on a console, extra controllers, and games, it had better do at least 1 thing better than the consoles I already own. The only thing the Wii, or the Wii U (or Nintendo in general, for that matter) does better is repackage my childhood and sell it back to me at today’s rates.