Technology

Wii U: Am I a joke to you?

Everyone: YES

Had an internet browser.

Controllers had mini screens available.

Shit was OP, ahead of its time.

The early model PS3 had a literal PS2 crammed inside of it for the sole purpose of backwards compatibility which was fascinating. The death of physical media (blu ray) and high price kind of caused it to flop that generation. Look who’s laughing now though!

I had one of those early model PS3s and I loved it. Eventually it died from overheating I think and I got a PS3 Slim to replace it only to discover my PS2 library was now unplayable...

A lot of people don't realize this, but the same thing applied at an even greater scale with PS3's Blu-Ray player.

At the time, Blu-Ray players cost $1000 while the PS3 launched at $500 or $600. Sony was legit doing everyone a solid, and they got shat on for it.

It's so sad how the xbox 360 won that gen, considering it was the more expensive console when you factor in paying for 2nd internet. Then it ended up normalizing the trend of 2nd internet, lol.

Needless to say, I stopped buying consoles at the PS4 era. Thank god emulation is great, PC hardware is cheap, and many console exclusives are getting PC releases anyways.

You touched on a few good points, but I think ultimately reached the wrong conclusion.

What 12-year-old boy asking for a Christmas present is going to choose the cutesy purple brick that "only has kid games" over a sleek black PS2 that is seen as being adult, with action and fighting games?

This was literally Segas entire marketing strategy. Nintendo early on decided to lean heavily into the family friendly marketing for their consoles starting with the NES (or famicom, literally family computer) for various reasons but most prominently because of the videogame crash of the 70s.

Sega saw an opportunity to position themselves as an edgier option that would appeal more to the tween and teen demographic and so leaned very heavily into that in their advertising in the 80s and particularly the 90s. This tactic was rather successful and so Nintendo developed a reputation as the console for children. This image was further cemented by certain decisions by Nintendo around game content, most prominently by the rather shortsighted decision to force the Mortal Kombat series of games to recolor characters blood to green instead of the red it was on arcade and sega systems (this could be disabled using a hidden cheat code somewhat rendering the entire exercise moot).

When Sony and Microsoft came along they didn't really need to do anything special besides release whatever games they wanted, the damage to Nintendo's rep was already done. Nintendo then made things even worse for themselves by releasing a console in bright candy colors most closely associated with marketing towards young children that literally looked like a small childs lunchbox.

Then the Wii came along and went HARD on the family-friendly aspect, and just blasted off the shelves.

Nintendo realized that they wouldn't be able to shake the children's console rep they had developed easily and so decided to lean heavily into messaging that their consoles were also for adults. Much of the marketing for the Wii (in fact the majority of it) depicted the console being played by adults and the elderly. It was actually somewhat rare to see advertising for the Wii showing young children using the console, a stark contrast from Nintendo's previous marketing.

This was also reflected in the design aesthetic of the console and its packaging featuring a modern minimalist flat white color scheme with minimal light blue highlights. Compared with previous Nintendo consoles the Wii was downright drab looking. Its packaging looked more like a product from Ikea than a games console.

Nintendo further lucked out with the Wii in that it had a novel control system utterly unlike anything else in the market at the time and so had a massive novelty factor going for it. Additionally helping with this was that they positioned the console at the extreme low end of the market releasing it at a price point well below half the cost of their nearest competitor.

And for the family friendly aspect nothing after the wii beat it.

The multiplayer games there are just better than something like the switch offers, and the controllers are a good size and weight for emulating whatever they are representing in games. Stuff like tennis with the tiny light switch controllers just feels wrong.

For sure. Lots of people knew how awesome game cube was and what it was capable of. Its lacking graphics with extremely well made games. The dreamcast was a powerhouse with VGA out. Barely anyone knew how amazing it was. It could have blown away Sony. Sega really dropped the ball. I wish I had known when it came out.

I'm on my 3rd dreamcast but it's been fine for the last couple decades. My genesis, though, 1991 and still fine. Kicking myself actually, the cartridge port was feisty for EVER but i finally had the guts to really look in there and i tweezed out 30 years of fuzz that had felted down in it.

The dreamcast is still underrated it seems.

The key flaw was it using mini disks. Not only did this kneecap storage capacity for developers, but it also made it difficult to pirate games, which is ironically a big part of its failure.

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Now it's ads and garbage all over the screen. Even at that I think ps3 xmb was my favorite console os

I got rid of the fat boy as soon as the slim came out

Right about now, the funk soul brother...

I like my hacked Wii u. Pretty versatile

Talk about an unpopular opinion. But hey your entitled to your opinion

I loved the controllers

I've always considered every Nintendo control scheme to be garbage and usually people can at least agree that the N64 was trash, but to call it a spot on layout? Damn, what kind of hands do you have? Lol

I got one for $5 at a garage sale. It didn't have controllers, the AC cord, or the video wires. It did however have a copy of smash in the disc drive which I consider a win, but I still haven't tested it out lol. I bought the AC cord (cost twice as much as the console lol). There's not really official cables that work for modern TVs. There's some janky Chinese ones on Amazon that need power to operate, and the fire danger of some random off brand AV cord sketches me out. I've also been too lazy to look for controllers. One day though, there will be smash.