Ah, Nintendo, I love you so much but you seriously make me hate you sometimes. Before I go any further I just want to thank everyone here for the overwhelmingly positive response to the piece I wrote yesterday on online gaming and anxiety. You guys are so awesome. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s begin.
Nintendo brought me my first experiences with gaming in my childhood. I have so many fond memories of spending hours and countless batteries playing Pokemon on my GameBoy Color and of all the times I had such fun totally sucking at Super Mario 64. However over the years I’ve been spending less and less time with Nintendo. It’s not that I don’t like their games anymore, it’s just that lately they’ve been doing things that make it difficult for me to play them.
I am a person with a muscular disability that has progressively taken away my ability to walk and function as a fully independent individual. I do my best to do as much as I can on my own and gaming has always been there for me and has helped me through many difficult times.
With the dawn of motion control and VR and all these other cool new ways of gaming I have felt like there are just some types of games that I won’t be able to play. I’m just glad that most people feel similar to me in that nothing can truly replace a controller or a mouse and keyboard.
Unfortunately, Nintendo seems keen on the idea of making consoles with alternative input devices. I remember back when the Wii came out I thought that I wouldn’t really be able to use it at all. I figured that when I upgraded from my GameCube that year it was time to switch over to Xbox or PlayStation although I guess I failed at getting that message across to my parents and I ended up getting a Wii for Christmas.
After spending some time with it I realized that I didn’t have that much difficulty with using it so I got to enjoy some great Nintendo experiences after all. Of course there were always things that were a little bit harder for me to do than for others such as swinging the Wii remote to attack in Twilight Princess.
Thankfully there were some great titles such as SSMB Brawl and Mario Kart Wii where I could switch out to a GameCube controller. Countless games of both of those fantastic titles were played in my house.
As my condition progressed it became harder and harder to play Wii games with the Wii remote and the advent of Wii Motion Plus made it that much more difficult. This, among other factors, is what led me to switch over to Xbox 360 as my primary gaming console and my Wii began to gather dust, only being used to play Smash Bros and Mario Kart at family gatherings.
Looking at the current generation of consoles, the major reason why I haven’t bothered with the Wii U is the gamepad. It’s large and unwieldy for my hands which really don’t have to same dexterity they used to. Some games even involve holding the gamepad up and moving it around which is all but impossible for me.
On a positive note however, I am absolutely loving my 3DS! It’s a fantastic system which is completely unhindered by my disability and it has an amazing library of games. I’m currently working my way through A Link Between Worlds and loving every minute of it.
I love Nintendo and I love the games they make. It’s a shame there are some aspects of Nintendo that I won’t be able to enjoy but at least there are numerous amazing Nintendo experiences I can enjoy with my 3DS.
Get involved!
Comments