G-pinions

Nintendo should be a software-only company. Outside of the GBA/DS, they should stop making consoles, the way Sega has been for a couple of years now. I came to this conclusion after reading a quote in EGM from their message boards that said "GameCube's a format for playing Nintendo games and little else." The rumor has been going around forever that they're going to take that path, despite their constant denials, and announcement of work on future hardware. And honestly, I think as long as they're a company, they'll keep making consoles. But they shouldn't.

The quote I mentioned above really struck a chord with me. It's so succinct, but totally true. When you think of a "Nintendo game", you think of great, classic characters, you think of the games you grew up on, you think of sitting around with your pals in high school playing Mario Kart 64 until your retinas gave out. Their family of games define gaming for most people, and will always be a reliable constant in the industry. They make great games, and that's all you need to know, or care about. Going along with that, the games defined their systems. While the Super Nintendo and Nintendo 64 might not have 'won' their respective generations, they were always head-to-head with their competitors in pretty much every respect. Other consoles came and went, but Nintendo have always stood strong. This is all because of their games. Not the general games released on those platforms, but Nintendo games, the games the company makes themselves. They take their time, and they get things right, so the games have always held up the system. Mario 64 is the game that launched a thousand platformers, and equal praise can be put upon many of their other titles.

Now, we reach the problem. Nintendo games are still great, if a little more derivative of themselves these days than usual. They once again blew everyone away at E3, and got millions of gamers wetting their short shorts over the DS and a new Zelda game. And that's fine. Those are their strengths. They will always make great portable hardware (every if the PSP somehow takes the lead this generation), and they will always make great games, and that's what people expect from them. And as successful as they've been this generation (second or third in sales, depending on your sources, but making a larger profit than the other two), they've fallen behind in countless other ways. They have so few third party developers left; if a game is released for two platforms, it's usually always PS2 and XBX, and rarely does a game see release on three nowadays. And people want to buy and play games. Lots of games. Almost all of their second-party developers are now making games for other platforms (Factor 5 and Silicon Knights fled ship, and HAL Laboratory is the only one I can think of off-hand that's still around, and barely at that). They've refused to lower the price on the majority of their titles, ever-so-slowly adding games to their Player's Choice list. They've given their best multiplayer games ridiculous GBA hardware requirements, making them impossible to enjoy for anyone outside of the most die-hard Nintendo fans. Worst of all, they've failed to make the jump online (two games doesn't count), the undeniable, unavoidable future (and present, for that matter) of the industry.

So why do we need a GameCube? Well, it's not to play a large variety of games. It's not to play the best-looking games. It's not to be able to buy cheap games. It's not to watch dvds. It's not to play online. So why then? To play Nintendo games. Not one GameCube owner in the country would tell you otherwise. And they'd all buy whatever hardware/software needed and spend whatever amount of money required in the future to keep playing Nintendo games. As would I. So, again I ask, why do we need the middle-man, the GameCube? Are their any other reasons? Sure, it's cheap and relatively portable and...uh....well, that's pretty much it. Nintendo likes to talk about how they only focus on games. Fine - let them focus on games. Take all the hardware out of the equation completely. If Nintendo made games for other consoles, they could only sell more games than they do now. Every Nintendo fan (most gamers) would still buy them, and casual PS2 and XBX owners would buy them as well. I think that's pretty much inarguable. They'd still be the best-selling games on any other platform. Hell, they wouldn't even have to publish them, they could just spend all their time working on Mario 512. On top of that, they'd have the user base and ready technology to be able to make online games, or experiment with whatever goofy concepts they could come up with. Just add a GBA/DS adapter to the other consoles, and they can still have all the wacky multiplayer requirements they want. Everything would be the same for Nintendo fans, and the only changes would be positive.

Sure, you can call this blasphemy - I felt really uneasy when I first saw the Sega logo whip across my PS2 screen. But as soon as the game started, I quickly forgot that I even gave a damn, because the game was as fun as ever. Sega were forced into it, and as a result, were a little under-prepared in the beginning. But if Nintendo foresaw what I foresee, they could make the jump at the end of this generation, smooth as butter, and we could all happily be playing Zelda: Hay Bale of Relevance online on our Playstation3 and Xenon come 2006. I don't think it will ever happen, but I think it's more sensible than anything Nintendo has done in a long, long time.