this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2024
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Wii U too. Two consoles with a whole extra screen on your controller. Brilliant and cool features. Misunderstood or poorly timed?
Misunderstood for sure, I think. The Wii U suffered from what was probably the worst marketing campaign of any game console, ever. I didn't even know it was a new console and not yet-another-Wii-addon until halfway through it's life cycle and I think that was a pretty common misunderstanding.
And no compelling games library. What do you buy a Wii U to play? Bayonetta 2?
Rayman Legends, Pikmin 3, Super Mario 3D World, Smash Bros off the top of my head. It had plenty of excellent games
Yeah, which of those would you say "Oh boy, I'm going to spend several hundred dollars on a new console so that I can play THIS game"?
The Wii U had no killer app. The Gamecube had a stronger library throughout its life than the Wii U did. The Wii U was the thing they were also making during the 3DS era. Hell, the big game that was developed for the Wii U, Breath of the Wild, became a killer app for the Switch.
Given a Wii U and a collection of games for it, you can have some fun, certainly. It also has access to the Wii's library, being essentially a Wii with an HDMI port, and it can access a lot of the older Nintendo library in a way that the Switch stubbornly doesn't. A modded Wii U is a pretty cool thing to have. The Wii U had an abysmal career but it lived so it could retire.
Mario Kart 8 was probably the "killer app" (in my opinion), fortunately the switch also gave that a second lease of life!
Mario Kart 8 didn't sell Wii Us the way Breath of the Wild sold Switches or Halo sold Xboxen.
Or the way MK8 sold Switches!
The way I felt about the Wii U was probably similar to how adults felt about the Dreamcast back then.
It seemed really cool, but it didn't feel worth the money while there were other great consoles already. I was still getting a ton of use out of my original Wii.