You’re not wrong about those two problems, but I think that the third one, which maybe is more important than your second one, was the shortage of decent software.

Other than the most-prominent Nintendo games (things with Mario, Wario, Zelda or Donkey Kong in the title, plus a few others), there was really not many great Wii games. Certainly some (including Boom Blox & de Blob, as mentioned), but to own a Wii was knowing that there would only be a couple of decent games each year – and even that slowed down badly in the last couple of years.

And, like handhelds, the Wii probably suffered more from the rise in iphones/ipads than other consoles.

jokes. nice piece. I feel justified never having played one now.

But I’ve got another view of the Wii, which I’ve only just realised. The Wii’s a lavalamp. Slightly nifty, but ultimately merely emblematic of a very specific time and culture, separated from the broader continuity of culture. Maaybe.

You watch. In thirty years time, the sczhwipsters will be buying wiis to ironically decorate their college dorm rooms.

(And yes, “college dorm rooms” is semiotically identical in both Australian and US context, albeit by a different process.)

It was a great idea, but the problem with this was two fold:

1) The hardware wasn’t up to the task. Point your remote away from the screen and you lose fidelity. And as someone who worked on a Wii Star Wars game, you can understand our frustration – what should have been a PERFECT match to sell games and consoles fell drastically short of expectation because you couldn’t hold the wiimote like a lightsaber.

2) Nintendo enforced unnatural movement into games which didn’t need it. Not only was the Wiimote necessary to operate ALL games, the “waggle” was required on ALL games. This meant, in games like Indiana Jones for example, instead of having simple timed button presses, you had to do ridiculous movements of the controller (which, again, were severely lacking in fidelity) so what should have been an incredibly fun game came out as one of the worst on the console.