saiko saru

To be fair, I thought they handled GBA's launch well. I as a tyke at the time though, so a lot of those games were appealing.

They need to step up their game though, and stop riding on Wii's coattails.

Nintendo relies too much on third parties though. The only first party title was Super Mario Advance. Microsoft, and Sony look for studios to acquire so they can have them focus on creating huge hit titles for them, and it works. Not so much with Nintendo, I feel that they don't support their consoles enough themselves.

Nintendo's first party studios:

• Retro Studios
• Nd Cube
• 1-UP Studios
• Intelligent Systems
• HAL Laboratory

HAL is their main power house, and Nd only focuses on their handhelds. The other studios are a bit of a dead weight by not producing much / widely popular titles. Nintendo needs more subsidiaries like HAL; although HAL is spread a bit too thin imo.

Their competition has,

Sony:

• SCE Santa Monica Studio (God of War)
• SCE Studio Liverpool (WipeOut)
• Sucker Punch (Sly Cooper, Infamous)
• Zipper (SOCOM)
• Guerilla Games (Killzone)
• Media Molecule (LittleBigPlanet)
• Naughty Dog (Crash Bandicoot, Jak & Daxter, Uncharted)
• Polyphony Digital (Gran Turismo)
• Bend (Syphon Filter)
• Japan Studio (Patapon, Team ICO stuff)

Microsoft:

• Lionhead (Fable)
• Turn 10 (Forza)
• 343 / Bungie (Halo)
• Epic (Gears of War)

Agreed. The one thing I will say about Nintendo, despite them being slower to announce first party games, is they almost always trump Microsoft/Sony's IP's in terms of quality. Usually not on the hardware side, but in design. The concepts they dream up usually grab my attention before whatever the competition is working on, whimsical, kiddy, or not.

One other thing I wanted to say. I'm definitely a Nintendo guy, and I probably always will when it comes to non-PC gaming. However, I would like to see them take the company in an entirely different direction. Instead of spending 90% of their resources recycling tried and true games, invest in researching other studios and collaborate more amongst up and coming dev/studios. As much as I like Mario, Zelda, DK and the like, I find the newer entries to be less "magical" than their predecessors, with a few exceptions (DK Country and Skyward Sword -- without having to rely on motion controls -- were both fantastic, testaments to the good old days).

I actually really like Nintendo and their IPs. I was a Nintendo kid, my first console was a NES, then Gameboy, SNES, N64, and DS; but I haven't bought a Nintendo console since then until the Wii U. I want to love Nintendo again.

I did buy Zelda for the Wii even though I didn't have one I still can't play it though since I don't have Wii controllers. So I'm really curious about the Wind Waker HD.

Wind Waker will be gorgeous with the updated models. I'm worried about the load times though; that sea is pretty darn vast.

I hope they can get a firmware update out ASAP for load time improvements. It's pretty ridiculous how slow it is.

I must admit, recycling the same IP's over and over again just really jades me to be honest. I would love to see Nintendo put some big bucks in to the 'next Zelda' or the 'next Mario'. Sure, it's risky, but at the end of the day Nintendo still have the old favourites to fall back on if it goes belly up. However, if it succeeds - well, the potential is enormous.

I guess what I'm really trying to say is, I want the magic to come back to gaming - I haven't felt it for a long time.

For the most part I'd agree but with the Wii it was the opposite: short-term was covered but long-term they didn't even consider. As soon as the family gimmick ran dry, its time was over. It's almost as if the Wii U is their scraped together long-term solution to the Wii's premature death.

Either way though, as much as I've barely played a Wii game (baring in mind I bought mine on launch day 1) , Nintendo game libraries > any other console. Doesn't matter how much their devs are limited apart from near launch. Consistently, forever, Nintendo has had some of the best exclusives of their gen. 64: Ocarina, Goldeneye, Smash Bros, Mario 64. Gamecube: Sunshine, Luigi's Manshion, initially RE4, Metroid Prime, Melee. Wii: Galaxy, Skyward Sword, Brawl, Xenoblade Chronicles, Last Story, etc. Literally all console buyers imo, whereas it's hard to say the same for a console like Xbox. I'd say Sony have libraries that rival here and there but moreso for their scale of good games as opposed to quality, but Sony launches are absolutely dire recently.

So sure the Wii U has started bumpy and the company's short-sighted but I don't think the issue with Nintendo will ever be quality games being available, just being buried beneath a sea of shit and when they get there is when they get there.