The Seventh Generation: Nintendo Wii

While it has been much longer than just a couple weeks, The Seventh Generation is back.  The first console to look back on is Nintendo's biggest gamble, the Wii.  Coming off of a turbulent run with the Gamecube (Nintendo's weakest selling game console at the time), Nintendo came to terms with the fact that they could not compete with Microsoft and Sony when it came to computing power.  Nintendo looked at their strengths, gameplay and design, and the risk taken with the Nintendo DS for inspiration for their newest console.  Instead of directly competing with the Xbox 360 and PS3 in terms of power, the Wii focused its entire design around one core mechanic, motion control.  Motion controls were attempted in earlier console generations, but they were never refined to the point of actually being more than a non-functional gimmick.  The Wii brought motion controls to the forefront of the video game industry and nobody could have predicted the success to follow.

Apart from the hardcore Nintendo fans that flocked to the Wii for the newest entries in Nintendo's venerable franchises (Mario, Metroid, Legend of Zelda, Donkey Kong and Super Smash Bros.), the Wii caught the attention of people who never considered playing video games as an activity for them.  The simplistic design the Wii Remote, which was intentionally designed to look and feel like a TV remote, and the familiarity of the sports included in Wii Sports, the game packed in with every Wii system, broke down the large barrier of entry video games had before this point in time.  No longer did people have to learn complex button presses to play games, they just had to mimic certain motions to get involved.  This universal appeal equated to monstrous sales for the Wii.  While the Wii may had been a minimal improvement over the Gamecube in terms of power and graphics, it easily outsold PS3 and Xbox 360, incredibly more powerful machines, this past generation.

Being the most successful system of the past generation did not mean the Wii was the best console of this past generation.  In actuality, the Wii was quite the opposite.  Although Nintendo and a few other developers used the Wii's under-powered specs to create artistically stunning games, the majority of Wii games can be considered lacking at best.  During the early years of the Wii, there was such a large number of shovel ware released on the machine that it was hard to discern between the good and the bad.  For every Super Mario Galaxy, there were dozens of shovel ware like Carnival Games and Chicken Shoot.  The Wii, much like the Nintendo 64 and Gamecube, suffered from a lack of third-party support.  While there were publishers like Sega, Ubisoft and EA that supported the Wii with numerous games, a good number of publishers such as Bethesda and Take-Two passed over the Wii due to its lack a processing power.

For Nintendo fans, the Wii offered a lot of great games both old (through the power of the Virtual Console) and new that you could not experience anywhere else.  Apart from the core Nintendo faithful and the new slew of casual gamers, the Wii did not offer enough to sway people away from the most cutting-edge systems in the PS3 and Xbox 360.  The Wii may be among Nintendo's most successful video game consoles, but it will never be remembered as fondly as its predecessors.