Let me start off by saying I agree with people who think Nintendo is getting a bit out of hand with the Amiibos. They’re a great concept, and I don’t think Nintendo is holding out on as much content as people are saying they are, but hot damn dude you gotta slow down with those things. Especially if we’re going to continue on with the price tags and inventory issues.
Ok, so anyway.
It’s usually around E3 time that people start ranting about how Nintendo is trying too hard to be different and weird and it’s only going to hurt them because being different is bad, the nail that sticks out gets hit, etc. Well, news flash people: Nintendo has always been weird, and that’s ok.
Let’s go all the way back to the days of the NES. Nintendo wasn’t satisfied with the normal NES controller, so they went and made a lot of different peripherals. Some made sense like the NES Max with its turbo buttons and circular replacement for the d-pad (which I just found out is called a “cycloid”) and the Nintendo Zapper for games like Duck Hunt. But then you had real oddities like R.O.B, the Power Pad, and probably the most famous NES peripheral, the Power Glove. Hell they even had a fight-stick type controller with the NES Advantage. Tell me people were expecting shit like this back in the day.
The SNES had Super Game Boy and the SNES Mouse, a peripheral that was like a computer mouse, only for the SNES. You weren’t playing Mario Paint with anything but that sucker. Super Game Boy, though, was one of the better ideas Nintendo has had in their history I say. It let you play your Game Boy games on your TV through your SNES. You could change backgrounds and overall game color, and as time went on Game Boy games started including special backgrounds when played using Super Game Boy. Both of these were great, the Super Game Boy much more so, but showed Nintendo was willing to try new things.
You could keep going with things like the Nintendo 64’s controller, Gamecube using mini-disks, the DS and its dual-screens, etc. To say now that Nintendo is weird and trying to be quirky is silly and ignoring the fact that they’ve always been weird like this. Sure you had absolute flops like the Virtual Boy, but you had total winners like the Wii and 3DS.
The case can be made that the different peripherals mentioned above weren’t the sole focus of the system and were outliers while everything else was by the books, and that’s true. But just because Nintendo pulls something out of left field doesn’t mean they’re doomed. They should probably reel the Amiibos in just a bit, but when the NX is revealed with something inevitably strange I wouldn’t write it off.
Assuming the main controller for the NX isn’t a set of DK Bongos or something, that is.
– Jimizzle