This is ridiculous. A couple of years ago, my wife bought me a Nintendo Wii for Christmas. The reason? I wanted to play a couple of games on what they call the Virtual Console. That’s the mechanism they have for playing old Nintendo games on the Wii system. Games from the original Nintendo Entertainment System, the Super NES, the N64, and the Game Cube. Those last 3 don’t interest me in the least. The only one that meant anything was the original NES. These were the games of my youth: Super Mario Brothers (1,2, and 3), The Legend of Zelda, Contra, Punch Out, Mega Man, etc. I spent hours playing these games as a kid. That’s hours of enjoyment from my childhood.
So, when Jayme did get the Wii for me, I wasted little time before purchasing and downloading all of these games. It was awesome. It made so much sense. You can play all of these old games without having to fiddle with those NES cartridges that you were forced to blow in and spin around and hop on one leg. Only then could you put the cartridge back in the system and pray that it starts the game correctly. None of that with the Wii!
Then, tragedy struck. The fan inside the Wii stopped working one day and it will only allow me to keep it on for about two hours before it overheats (with the Virtual Console games) and only about 20 minutes with the current disc-based Wii games. So, that wasn’t going to work. I was willing to let it go and give up on my childhood gaming habits. My kids stepped in, however, and started to lobby for a new Wii system. So, we purchased another console. Nice. Now I get my old games, right?
WRONG!
Apparently, the games you purchase on a Wii console are “tied” to said game console. Hence, when I got my new console, I could not transfer those games from the old console. WTF? What is this, 1986? Needless to say, I was insanely pissed off about this. But, we still had disc-based Wii games that the kids love, so we kept the system. I was done, but they weren’t.
Recently, however, it has come to my attention that the discs we had are so scratched that the console will not play them correctly…effectively, rendering them useless. Remember all those nice things I mentioned about the notion of the virtual console games? Yeah, right out the window with these new games. We’re talking about games that cost anywhere from $30 to $50. What a f’ing racket. Now, the game my kids love (Super Mario Brothers Wii) is useless. The $50 game my kids love. Are they going to eventually ask for another copy of it? Um, most assuredly! What am I going to tell them? No? No, kids, because I’m a cheap ass bastard? Of course, I will melt like butter on toast and get another copy of it. (Granted, they will contribute to the replacement value with their allowance money, but you get the principle I’m trying to get at, right?!)
Anyway, after all that, I’m here to say I’m done with the Wii. In this day of cloud implementations of email, music, videos, and (hello?!?!) games from Apple, Google, Amazon, I have to count on a physical console to withstand a 4 and 6-year old? And not be able to transfer said purchases between devices?
No thanks!
