If you haven't watched this Jimquisition, you really should. It's quite interesting. Of course, Jim's decision is purely personal and as it so happens, it's exactly how I feel as well. With all the talk of who won versus PS4 and Xbox One, I honestly would say it was the Wii U that had the better launch. Obviously, this is apples and oranges, as Wii U's sales are no where near what either PS4 and Xbox One have now for their respective time periods, but these last two launches have been sorta.. ho-hum from a gameplay experience.
So, what defines a solid launch experience for me? It's the number of games that I have to get alongside it. I ended up getting seven Wii U games in comparison to three for the PS4 and only one for the Xbox One. I only got ONE launch game for the Xbox One! That is just absolutely pathetic, and something that's never happened to me before. Sure, there was Forza 5, but I'm not a simulation racing fan like I used to, and there's the whole issue regarding microtransactions that turned me. "Oh, but there was Ryse!" Uh... no. Anyway, enough about launch titles.
Jim brings up a really good point about the sense of wonderment. You can joke about the Wii U all you want, but out of the three new consoles, the Wii U is the only one that truly feels new and unique. The PS4 feels like a revised PS3, and the Xbox One feels like an enhanced 360. The Wii U is far more than just an enhanced Wii. It's a reinvented Wii. The tablet controller, when put to creative use, is loads of fun to play with, and made it hard to put down. I'm addicted to AC4 right now, which is why I can't put the PS4 controller down, but it's the game that's keeping me playing the machine. The Wii U TABLET kept me playing the Wii U. I would play New Super Mario Bros. U in bed just before I would go to sleep. I would take the tablet down to the kitchen and watch Netflix while I did dishes. Sure, the PS4's controller has been reinvented with a clickable touchpad and a speaker built in, but those aren't entirely new ideas, and Kinect 2.0 has been improved, but I'm still engaged in shouting matches with the thing trying to get it to "XBOX REWIND".
Don't get me wrong. I'm happy to have a PS4 and Xbox One and know each one will blow the Wii U's library out of the water in the years ahead, but honestly, the Wii U was far from a failure like everyone keeps making it out to be. The Wii U itself is an amazing machine that had a solid launch, whose only real crime was trusting Nintendo to market it well.
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