Ever since the N64, Nintendo has show again and again that it doesn't know what to do with the home console market. Yes, I'm aware the Wii was a success (at least commercially), but what did Nintendo do with that success? Fuck all. Here they had a chance to win back the hearts of gamers and what did they do? They refuse to support their console. Hell, they even have three perfectly good games they could release in the US but won't because they are too busy looking stupid while at the same time, ironically telling us that hardcore gamers are the target demographic for the Wii U! You couldn't make it up, could you?

Any true lover of video games out there will tell you that your plastic box ain't worth shit if it doesn't have a good library of games to play on it. And lets face it, the Wii has a piss poor library, worse than the GameCube because of the Wii's gimmicky motion controls. And that's what Nintendo focuses nowadays, isn't it? Gimmicks. Its like they can't sell a console without some gimmick anymore. Take a look at the 3DS, They put the thing out with virtually no games whatsoever hoping it would sell on the gimmick alone. If they actually made some proper games for the damn thing instead, they wouldn't have to do this pathetic price cut at all, people would be buying the damn thing if only they made a Donkey Kong, a Kirby and a Zelda (a new one) game for it. People love Nintendo's games and they will pay hard cash for them, What they wont do is buy a handheld with barely any games out for it.



Nintendo has lost their focus, They should be focusing on games, not hardware. The hardware is supposed to be just a vessel to deliver great games. Notice the difference between the announcement of the PS Vita and the Wii U. Sony didn't just brag about the hardware, they immediately let the world know that they were already putting some of their most successful game franchises on the thing. Killzone, Uncharted, Little Big Planet. What did Nintendo do? They masturbated over their gimmick controller at E3 while showing you gameplay footage from third-party games that were actually running on the the Xbox360 and PS3. It doesn't impress anyone that you can play a game of checkers on a video game controller, does it?

Some people seam to think that Nintendo is all about innovation, I find this absurd. Innovation doesn't only imply change, it implies improvement. Motion controls don't improve gameplay, A console that can only have one controller isn't an improvement either... Yeah, you get a touchscreen in the middle of your controller but you can't play Street Fighter against your brother in the same console. Nintendo hasn't innovated anything since the analog stick, and even then you could argue that Sega did it first with the Saturn 3D controller.
I don't hate Nintendo, but I really hope the Wii U flops. The sooner they become a third party developer, the better. That way they can once again focus on doing what they do best: Games. And the consumers won't have to spend their hard earned cash buying a useless piece of plastic with a gimmick just so they can play a new Zelda game every three years.

I recently acquired Shank on the PSN and while playing hard mode I found myself at low health for a long period of time and for the duration of this period, the screen turned red to warn me that I was low on health which I already knew because I can see the bloody health bar. This period of time was long enough that I started to have a feeling of discomfort in my eyes. The fact that the game has a health bar made this warning feel useless to me and I started to notice this wasn't the first time this happened. Recent games I played, like Bioshock 2 and Just Cause 2 also have red screen health warnings despite having health bars.

When did this shit become the norm? I usually think poorly of people who claim old games are better than modern ones. but things like these are starting to make me think that maybe they are not 100% crazy. At least in the old days, the developers assumed you were intelligent enough to interpret a health bar. Nowadays they assume you will only notice your health is low if they attempt to melt the eyes off your fucking face. Some games do this with grey instead, which is not as bad as red but still quite annoying. The infamous and Killzone franchises are quite fond of their grey screens yet they are completely unrequired and they serve no purpose other than to annoy the fuck out of people.

A player knows when he is about to die without these intrusive warnings. Even games without health bars like Mario or Sonic games. These games have no health bar but you know that if you have no mushrooms/rings, you are in danger. Imagine you are playing a Sonic game and your screen flashed red when you lost all your rings. That would be retarded, right? We didn't need this shit in the past and we don't need it now, damn it!
In the off chance that a game developer ever reads this...
I can read a fucking health bar, you dick.