30 Days of Gaming: Day 29: A Game You Thought You Wouldn't Like, But Ended Up Loving

Day 29: A Game You Thought You Wouldn't Like, But Ended Up Loving

Being this close to completing this thing, I don't want to now skip over a post or just write "I don't know." But I'm honestly coming up with a bit of blank on this. Obviously, most of the games I own I bought with the theory in mind that they were going to be pretty good. It's a little harder for me to come up off-hand with a game that I really detested the idea of, but then played through a friend or something and realized I actually liked. I'm honestly not sure there are many examples of that happening for me. I don't know, maybe I'm naturally optimistic about games before I play them, or maybe I'm a good judge of getting a read on a game when I first see it. There is something that would kind of fit the basic idea of this topic, though, if I stretch the rules a bit. And so to make a post that might actually be of interest to read, I'm going to go ahead and do that and answer:

The Entire Idea of the Nintendo Wii

I never owned a Gamecube. There was one in the dorm my senior year of college that gave me my fill of Super Smash Bros. Brawl, and I was willing to pass up the opportunity to play some games that looked interesting to me (Wind Waker, Metroid Prime) and just stick with a Playstation 2, rather than put down money for another console with an inferior overall library. I certainly wasn't the only person down on the Gamecube. Nintendo needed a bit of redemption with it's next console, I thought. So then comes E3, or the Tokyo Game Show, I don't remember which, and Nintendo comes out with their new system, with an easily mockable name (wee-wee!) and that uses a weird looking motion-controller. This is from a company that has a history of making some great games, but also making stuff like the Power Glove, the most pointless of all plastic musical instrument devices in the Donkey Konga drum, and the headache-inducing nightmare that was the Virtual Boy. Would the controller work at all the way it was supposed to? How feasible would be it be for games to be developed on it? Would it end up at the back of everyone's closet in three months?

I actually haven't been tempted enough to buy a Wii at this point, although with the price dropping, maybe. It still doesn't really have a huge, diverse library of games, which will always be a strike against it, but pretty much every experience I've had with the system has been positive. They made the hardware work, and have since further refined it with Wii Motion Plus and they've given you the option of using Gamecube controllers for games that require them or are easier with them. At launch, it had a simplistic, but great party game in the form of Wii Sports and it was equally adaptable to a more involved game like Twilight Princess. The success of the platform is evident in the fact that Sony and Microsoft both copied it in the form of Playstation Move and Kinect (granted, Kinect reprsents another leap forward in that it's entirely based on a camera and a controller at all). Nintendo went out on a limb with the Wii, and actually succeeded with it, unlike similar risks they've taken in the past. People will dismiss it's "casualness," but it's accessibility has brought in droves of new people to video games, and there's no reason why people who love holding an old fashioned controller and using all 14 buttons to call out ridiculously specific audibles in Madden shouldn't also be able to appreciate the simplicity of the Wii's make-whatever-motion-your-avatar-would-make style.

Next -- The grand finale!