How many people here owned a wii-u?

Captain Lumacey

Captain Lumacey

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I was reminded by the holiday of the time that my siblings and I recieved a Wii-u for Christmas when that was Nintendo's console. I know that the Wii-u was less successful than usual for Nintendo, but I'd imagine that on a Nintendo game specific forum, more of us had a Wii-u than the population at large, so here's your opportunity to talk about your experience owning a Wii-u, or if you never owned one, what you thoughts were on the Wii-u and nintendo in general during the first part of the 8th console generation.
 
I got mine for Christmas 2013! I loved playing Super Mario 3D World and NSMBU...
 
Sparks said:
I got mine for Christmas 2013! I loved playing Super Mario 3D World and NSMBU...
Click to expand...
Same for me. I remember opening up the Wii U and thinking, hey where's the 3D effect on the gamepad??? I remember getting up early every morning after Christmas to play SM3DW. I must of beat it in under 3 days. Also, we did have a Wii but it was broken so that meant we got to play all our old Wii games again. Looking back, I don't think the Wii U was entirely bad. I think it was a necessary step. The Switch feels like what the Wii U was trying to achieve.
 
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I had one (well, I still have it but it's in storage in the garage) and I gotta be brutally honest here: I think it's one of the goddamn worst consoles ever put out that had a relatively normal lifespan (by 'relatively normal lifespan' I mean I'm discounting stuff that flopped so badly it was off the market in 2-3 years and MAYBE at most sold a a couple million consoles but more likely didn't even crack a million).

It was just a failure on practically every level imaginable.

People always talk about the name being why it failed and that obviously was a big reason but there's so much more to it than 'the name was bad'.

Let's talk power real quick: the Wii U was, on paper, a bit more powerful than the PS3 and Xbox 360. Of course in practice, the outdated architecture of the Wii U meant that the few AAA 3P games it got early on (before it became obvious this shit was a flop) often ran worse than on those consoles. It also came out in 2012. The Xbox 360 came out in 2005 and the PS3 came out in 2006. Nintendo released a console that was only a bit more powerful than consoles that were 6-7 years old and at the age where the core gaming audience was getting excited for the next gen of consoles. Outside of hardcore Nintendo fans, nobody wanted to pay $300 for PS360 level hardware with a Fisher-Price tablet controler.

Oh and the library too. Look - I am not going to say 'The Wii U had no goods games', it certainly did have some. But let's be real here: the Wii U came out in November 2012 and that first year-ish of the console's lifespan was brutal. Nintendo clearly thought Nintendo Land was going to be just as an enticing pack-in game as Wii Sports was for the Wii. It wasn't. They probably expected New Super Mario Bros U to be a big holiday hit because it was the first time a new Nintendo console launched with a brand-new Mario game since the Nintendo 64 but uhhh you know launching New Super Mario Bros 2 on the 3DS like four months prior to launching your brand new console (and Mario game) was probably not the best idea. Then Nintendo's next published game (going by US releases here) was Lego City Undercover in March. Again, good game but not exactly something that's gonna make people scramble to buy the Wii U. And it goes without saying that stuff like Game & Wario, Pikmin 3, or The Wonderful 101 were never going to remotely be system sellers.

I'd honestly say the first game Nintendo put out that I'd consider a 'system seller' for the Wii U was Super Mario 3D World.

Which came out in November 2013.

A whole ass year after the console launched . And a whole ass year after the system already became regarded by potential customers as a 'dead system'. You can't come back from that. Plenty of consoles have a slow start at first but the Wii U didn't have a slow start. It literally died out of the gate and the support it got (or rather didn't get) reflected that.

Even the two main selling points of the entire system were at complete odds with each other. The idea was that the Wii U GamePad's display could be used for either second screen functionality like on the DS and 3DS or for playing the game entirely on the controller so someone else can be watching TV instead. But those two gimmicks contradict each other. If a game seriously uses the second screen on the controller then that means you won't be able to use the off-TV play gimmick. But also supporting off-TV play means you can't do anything major with the whole second screen gimmick. (Do y'all remember how Mario Kart 8's GamePad features amounted to 'you can turn on and off tilt controls, display a map, and a fucking horn button' lmao?)

God I could go on but outside of Nintendo's own games, the Wii U was just completely awful in every way possible. Utterly anemic library, underpowered hardware (and it lacked either the cheapness that the Wii had compared to its competiton or a compelling hook that the Switch has comparing to its competition that made people not care about the lack of power), an OS that was slow as molasses (people talk about how boring the Switch and Switch 2 OSes are but I'd rather a console have a boring but snappy OS than an interesting but slow one), a gimmick that never proved itself worth anything, etc.

What a terrible console.

And they can just brick themselves too if you leave it untouched, which is just the icing on the shit cake.
 
I was one of the ten Wii U owners. I remember buying launch day and having to carry it back to the office and it was way heavier than it had any right being.

I feel like the gamepad gimmick was poorly marketed. Like, having a separate screen for kiddies to play while the grown ups watch TV or something. It would have come in handy when I was younger and wanted to play games while my folks wanted to watch cricket.

I generally liked the library.
 
I got one for my birthday cuz I wanted to hack it and play the Nintendo Millennial games the Nintendo Millennials talk about.

Mostly classical Paper Mario and Animal Crossing.

Actual Wii U games too. I refuse to emulate dual screen systems, absolutely miserable experience.
 
I still like the Wii U and use it regularly and I'm not ashamed to admit that. I don't remember exactly when I got mine but I think it was around 2014 or 15? I don't have many games for it (the ones I do have mostly just being Mario games and Mii games) but what I have, I like. I also make mods for Wii Sports Club so there is that too.

Objectively, I can admit that it wasn't great as a console and its marketing was absolutely terrible but it's like my guilty pleasure console. It's also really good for recording footage of Wii games because it has HDMI so I use it for that pretty often.
 
Me spent HOURS play Mario Maker on it infact I got the one that HAD Mario Maker Pre instaled.
 
the wii u was actually the best console of all time, because it had the best game of all time, splatoon 1
the yoshi game was pretty good too and mario maker and pikmin 3 although that game was very hard cause you had to control 3 guys
 
I have a love–hate relationship with the Wii U. The GamePad is bulky and unattractive, while the Pro Controller is nearly perfect. I'd take the aesthetics of the system menus over the Nintendo Switches' apathetic sterility any day, but awful loading times made them an obstruction that Nintendo had to build detours around. I loved using Miiverse and seeing posts crop up in-game, i miss the Internet Browser's gyro scroll mode every time i think about it, and the Switch 2's C button wishes it had the allure of the GamePad's NFC touchpoint—but there weren't many other features to explore, especially compared to everything the Nintendo 3DS came with, and much less what it got through system updates.

The barren feeling of the game library was a vicious cycle. It was hard not to dwell on series like Animal Crossing, Kirby, and Wario skipping the console or only delegating experimental spinoffs to it. At the same time, games like Mario Kart 8, Splatoon, and Super Mario Maker felt like cultural phenomena and left a deep impact on me. There is no substitute for experiencing the beginning of the latter two series alongside the tighter-knit fan communities of the time.

It was a good and bad time to be a Mario fan. Games must have been coming out more regularly, and i felt that they were iterating more consistently from the DS to then. However, it often seemed to come at the expense of creativity, which would only be addressed afterwards. Combined with the 3DS, we often ended up with two games of the same design. That was excellent for series like Mario Kart, but maddening with others like Paper Mario. This pattern started the console off on a horrible misstep with New Super Mario Bros. U, which is great fun in a vacuum, and yet a total waste as a selling point for the new hardware. And i love Super Mario 3D Land as a handheld game, but with all signs pointing to Super Mario Universe in glorious HD, the announcement of 3D World felt like a similar waste.

As a Wii U owner, the Nintendo Switch felt similarly barren and boring for many years, since Nintendo released so many Wii U ports at full price plus online tax (up to industry darling Breath of the Wild, whose status as a Wii U game is probably effaced from the public consciousness at this point). I always felt that if the Wii U did so poorly, players who bought its games should have gotten ambassador discounts, to make it less painful to double-dip, have the original online lobbies obsoleted, and have fewer new games on Switch in general. Instead, buying a Wii U dragged the next console down even further for me. Nintendo has a storied history of anti-consumer practices, but, being on the back foot, the Wii U era felt like the last time they were willing to extend an olive branch.

The end result is that i look back on the Wii U fondly, in spite of the disappointments that the journey brought. People act like owning the console was nothing but frustration and regret. Sure, there were times when i felt completely fed up and betrayed, but such feelings never came to define that era like they would with the Nintendo Switch family. The Wii U is a clunky, confused mess, but it valued aesthetics, community, and novelty, and put out plenty of games so damn good that its successor had to pass them off as its own—all of which fills in a lot of the cracks with gold.
 
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