9. Speaking of Nintendo, the Wii was my favorite console of this generation. It's true: Even with all the shovelware that North American gamers had to wade through on the console, I really think the Wii was the best one this generation. Nintendo has always made the best first-party games in my opinion, and this generation was no different, with must-have titles like
Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Super Mario Galaxy, and my personal favorite game disc I've ever spent money on,
Metroid Prime Trilogy. Just those games alone are far superior to anything else I've played on both the 360 and PS3, and that's only stuff Nintendo actually made. The
Trauma Center games,
Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition, the upcoming
The Last Story, and a bunch of others made the Wii an absolutely amazing machine, HD graphics or otherwise. I also kind of LIKED the fact that not many games got downloadable updates, because that meant that developers actually had to release completed products, which is something they like to forget about nowadays when it comes to other platforms.
The thing that I always thought was the Wii's strength wasn't the motion that Nintendo pushed down our throats. No, the Wii's major strength was the infrared pointer functionality in the tip of the Remote. To this day, I personally believe that the IR pointer and sensor bar are more accurate than a computer mouse. While the mouse movement is simulated (you move the cursor up and down by moving the plastic mouse forward and backward), you're actually doing honest-to-goodness pointing with the Wii Remote, and it just feels so much more accurate and natural to me than any other control scheme I've ever used. The fact that you can move your hands independently of each other helps immensely, too.
I know I'm probably in the vast minority, but no 360, PS3 or PC game has given me as much joy as a well-done Wii game has so far.
10. I've been visiting Destructoid on a daily basis since it was less than a year old. A friend of mine introduced me to Destructoid when it was about six months old. After lurking for quite a while, the first contribution I made was sending in a scanned copy of the entire
Red Steel manual, since the game was released in stores before the Wii was. Manuals for Wii games seemed to be cropping up all over the Internet (including on Destructoid), presumably because people wanted to get an idea of how the controller would work, so I scanned and sent the manual to Niero. The scanned booklet made the front-page news, at which point Robert Summa exploded, because he thought scanning game manuals and spreading them around was pointless. After I stopped being afraid that he was actually going to hunt me down and kill me in a drawn-out assault, I found the entire experience to be hilarious, and I've been here ever since.
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