Always bank on the Crank*.
*Yes, I'm aware that this is quite lame, but catch phrases aren't my thing, dammit! It's a work in progress!
I'm pretty sure that tagline already belongs to Breaking Bad, or at least should.
I don't disagree entirely with the sentiment that Nintendo couldn't have done better in the grand scale. There are obviously a lot of ways they could have done things better on the small scale: they could have been better prepared for HD development, they could have spent a bit more freely from the "warchest" to re-invest in future success, they could have advertised more
effectively even if they chose not do it in a greater quantity.
I don't blame them, necessarily, for the core design. Yes, it was unlikely they were going to be able to recapture the "lightning in a bottle" that made the Wii what it was, but given how ridiculously profitable the Wii was it's not hard to understand why they felt they had to
try to do so. The possible payday makes it easy to see, from a purely business perspective, why they would make some of the choices they made.
As a gamer, though? I had been telling people for a solid decade what a shame it was that Nintendo had bet on the wrong horse in the PSX days. How they were a clearing house of brilliant ideas and sublime design, and they were just in the unfortunate circumstance of not having the capital and public interest to show people what they were truly capable of.
The Wii wasn't
a chance to do that, it was
the chance. They had a mountain of money up to the sky and a pulpit from which to address not only twice as many gamers as had ever been in their congregation before, but the teaming masses of casual gamers who had flocked to their side. They had every advantage in the world, a single perfect opportunity to really show everyone the full depths of their capacity, the absolute apogee of their long-honed craft and revolutionary design, completely uncontested and unmolested by any sort of outside interference.
And they gave us this sad little hunk of plastic.
I'm still willing to believe there's brilliance in Nintendo. I'm ready for them to come to market with some crazy wearable console that does game-changing augmented reality, or for them to finally swallow their pride and undertake an unprecedented partnership that would completely change the landscape of the industry. I hope they do, I hope their next "console" isn't so much a console as something that completely invalidates the current concept of home consoles forever.
I no longer believe that it's simply a lack of resources ("Oh, Microsoft just moneyhatted their way to dominance!") or misfortune ("Oh, if only Square hadn't jumped ship!") that causes them to fail, however. There are deep-seated systemic problems within the company that require as massive a change in not only management but the fundamental way they handle development - on a scale no less than the sort of change they need to affect on the gaming industry to get themselves back into a tenable position.
Hopefully this is the wake-up call that gets them into triage. This company might be able to "survive" another five years of Iwata, but it's going to be a pale shadow of squandered potential and bitter memories by the time that's done.
