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The end of Nintendo's weird GamePad era

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  • The end of Nintendo's weird GamePad era

    I don't know about you, but I absolutely adore the mad side of Nintendo. The one that announces the localisation of a game with a 10-minute mix of surreal salesmanship and cut-glass cuteness. The one that pauses halfway through another conference to contemplate an unpeeled bunch of bananas. The one that got so carried away with the 3D fad it bet on the marvel of glassless 3D in a handheld whose ubiquity has helped obscure its eccentricity.
    It's the same Nintendo that went all in on one of its most bizarre hardware ventures since the Virtual Boy - only this time, it's had the miserable sales figures to match. The Wii U has been an oddity since day one, when Nintendo never seemed quite able to pin down what it was that made this unfortunately named successor to one of the company's great success stories stand out. The magic wand that waved the Wii into 100 million households was nowhere to be seen. Instead, we got this strange lumpen pad, an off-kilter console appropriation of the DS's dual-screen set-up with its own lightly bleached monitor.
    And I absolutely love it. The mini-game compilation Nintendo Land showed the potential of having two very different screens, and how talented developers could inject a social frisson in the space between them. Other party games have come and gone but it's Nintendo Land, well over three years on, that I keep returning to. In another few years, when I mark it down as one of the games of the generation, I'll be doing so with a completely straight face. Ubisoft, meanwhile, used the friction found in the empty space between those screens to inject a little extra suspense in its atmospheric horror game Zombi U.
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