>>21345444It was a completely different time back then. A lot of families still had “family time” where they’d spend the afternoon and evenings watching TV or playing a boardgame. Video games were simply incompatible; sure you could play with friends and some even had split-screen capabilities, but the general feeling was that those games were too involved to be a group activity.
I’m talking: giant fucking ABS plastic computers with the floppy disk and disk drives; mouse, keyboards, joystick sometimes, and driving/gun controllers even less so. If it weren’t a computer game it was a console game or a handheld cartridge game like the old Gameboys. Video games in 2006 were still largely enjoyed at the arcade, but there were new video game technology being pioneered every year with Sony and Xbox being at fierce competition with one another. It was fucking brutal; a real tribal element where you were either a PS kid or an Xbox kid, or a loser with a desktop.
The Wii came onto the scene early enough to mesh in nicely with the gun/joystick/driving controllers like the ones you’d find at the arcade and the family time was still a thing. The games the Wii advertised were all sports and group activity games where you’re not meant to play by yourself. The problem however is that it was nicer to actually go bowling than it was to bowl on the Wii. In fact, a lot of the games on the Wii were terrible, and as games for the PS and Xbox got better and wilder, kids naturally gravitated toward that and away from the Wii.
The Wii is the uncanny valley of video game history. It had so much to live up for and it hit the scene at a good enough time, and yet it felt old quick.
