For some odd reason, I'm mildly curious about the Nintendo Wii U. As with many others, not enough to stand in line overnight like the Wii, but still, enough that I might buy it. Video game consoles are still an enormous investment of time and money, so it's difficult to be just a casual gamer, especially considering I already have a tablet and phone with games especially catered to my demographic.
And yet, I owned every non-portable Nintendo game console: NES, SNES, N64, GameCube and Wii. I feel like I'll be missing out on something. I already do with the Zelda series, unable to finish Twilight Princess and not having yet played Skyward Sword. I guess that, like a long novel, I need to have the discipline to complete them, even if it means I might have to get help from a game guide to stop me from wandering around in the game, not knowing what to do.
Also, having backwards compatibility will help me rekindle with the large collection of Wii games I amassed over the years. The Wii's GameCube backwards compatibility wasn't as interesting, because there weren't as many interesting GameCube games I'd like to play again. Nintendo did the clever thing of repackaging many old GameCube games to the Wii's new controls, so in that way I don't need to use the Wii to play those old games as much.
Now, the question is when I'm going to buy one. Right now it's a mess, with little availability in stores, and the firmware being so "blank" that it requires a 5 GB initial update. So, I'll buy one when buying one can be done casually, and not having to race around stores and use some crazy reservation system, so maybe by Spring 2013. Or maybe I'll get lucky this time around.
Published on November 19, 2012 at 21:16 EST
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