Okay, you might think that Nintendo is simply a company that exists to service the ever growing market of the casual gamers who are sucking the life out of the gaming industry. But actually I don’t think they are, and here’s why.
Whilst more and more gamers are turning theirs backs on the game company that raised many of us and introduced to the world of gaming. Without such games as Pokemon, The Legend Of Zelda or the might Mario, how many of us would be gaming now? Some of us might. But I probably wouldn’t, and in fact many of my friends wouldn’t and I’m willing to bet one out of three of your friends probably wouldn’t have continued gaming. And without Mario or Pokemon, would we have the games we have now? Mario was one of the first real platformers, without it we probably wouldn’t have games like Sonic or Metroid. Without Pokemon, we wouldn’t have many of our current handheld titles. Pokemon proved that handheld gaming could work, and it is the second highest selling franchise behind Mario. 
However, the Wii is currently the best selling games console ever, with an average of 2.6 Wii’s per person. So yes, it is being used to play a lot of games like WiiSports, WiiPlay, WiiFit or WiiMusic, or in fact any game with the word Wii in it’s title or that has a friendly pastel colored shirt wearing family in the adverts. It has however, brought gaming to a much wider audience. Now, when my family comes over, we will stick on the Wii and play some Mario Kart, before the Wii came along, the only person who would play any games with me in my family, was my little sister because she liked playing 007:Nightfire. It’s become a family event, my family enjoy it so much that they bought their own Wii and play it quite often now. Before this, many families only had a game console if their child owned it. The Wii is showing people that gaming isn’t evil, and it doesn’t make everyone into a murderer or rapist.
But, there is still the problem of the Wii being a pile of casual games rolled into one, with a weak motion control idea and the ability to sell games to anyone. However, please don’t rag on the fact that they haven’t released any good games or that they need to be more original. They might not have released any new ideas, but they continue to release some of the best games out there, and with a consistency that Microsoft or Sony would love to have.
At the end of the day, the Wii has proven that gamers aren’t evil or going to kill you, it’s shown that perhaps the gaming community could possibly grow. I started this article off by saying that I don’t think that Nintendo exists to service the casual gamers of the world. But how many of you out there, reading this, are able to say that you don’t enjoy playing games like Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Pokemon or Donkey Kong? How many of you began your gaming lives with these games? How many of you think that these games, in one incarnation or another, are some of the best games ever created? I think they are there.
George Marriott has been playing Nintendo games for along time, and he isn’t a fan boy. Seriously, not a fan boy.
