Wii-rthless

You know, Nintendo, sometimes you really piss me off. "Sometimes" being most of the time lately.

Just one year after the closure of Miiverse (a right brain social media experiment that let people post images of their progress in video games and comment with text or simple drawings), Nintendo has announced that it will bring all video streaming services on the Wii to a grinding halt. Yes, it's a legacy system, but with one hundred ten million units sold, the Wii is everywhere. It was a cheap and convenient gateway to Netflix for less tech-savvy consumers who may have found other devices too cumbersome. I say this from personal experience, because my mother is using a Wii right now to watch episodes of Jane the Virgin*. Apparently, she won't be doing much of that after January 29th.

Because Nintendo subscribes to the
adage "go big or go home" when
screwing its customers, it released
the Wii Mini in late 2012. It has no wi-fi,
no Internet, no SD card slot, no
component video, and no GameCube
support. It's mini in size, but delivers
BIG disappointment!

I marvel at how poorly the Wii has aged, and it's not just because of the budget hardware that kept it one step behind its competitors in overall performance. Due to its reliance on online features, and Nintendo's eagerness to pull the plug on those features at its earliest convenience, it's a console that just keeps getting shittier with each passing year. The Wii experience is already a hollow shell of its former self without apps like the News Channel, Weather Channel, and Everybody Votes. In two months, you won't even be able to use it to stream videos. 

I can't think of too many other consoles in my collection with an eroding feature set. The Sega Genesis has been around for thirty years, and its support for the Power Base Converter and the Sega CD has remained intact. Classic Game Boy games still fit in my Game Boy Advance, and the Kinect still connects to my Xbox 360. Yet everything that the Wii was in 2006 no longer is twelve years later. Call it the curse of the internet age, but I prefer to think of it as Nintendo being a humongous dick.

* About this show. I was talking to a trans guy about it last night, and he made the point that the premise for this series, about a woman who's artificially inseminated by accident, sounds more like a medical nightmare than the basis for a zany comedy. He's not wrong, you know.