No I still say they started on the right path to AT LEAST keep Nintendo consoles on life support. Its the lack of follow through that messed it up for them.
Messed it up how, though? I harbor a lot of nerd rage toward the Wii but the fact is it exploded Nintendo's sales in a way the far less gimmicky Gamecube never did.
They didn't *actually* focus on gameplay, though -- anything but.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that the Gamecube's impressive array of first- and so-called second-party games represent a total and laser-like focus on the quality of play, but Nintendo was clearly dissatisfied with the profits, so they took basically the opposite direction and ignored that completely.
It frustrates me that they were proved so right to have done so.
The lasting legacy is going to be that the concept it promised forced Microsoft and Sony to come up with technology that will actually let you do that stuff.
And even with Microsoft's fantasyland Natal project, none of that stuff looks fun. Sure, that breakout game looks neat and I'll bet it's great fun for a couple hours, but when I'm done I'll probably just put the Fallout disc back in and play that for another hundred.
Burnout without a controller is a hilarious demonstration of how smart the thing is, but it's a stupid way to play when you can just go to the store and buy a wheel controller. And that creepy child locked in the TV was
potentially an amazing demonstration (depending on how the voice and conversation actually work,) but how do you make a game from it? How long would it take to expose the inner workings of that and reveal how simplistic it really is? An hour? A minute? And then what have you got left? Just a gimmicky parlor trick that doesn't add anything to the game at all; it's just glitter.
It probably has a lot of applications in multiplayer avatar games. Amping in 1 vs 100 is funny in a silly way, but if I could directly control my avatar's limbs I'd probably just give everyone the finger. That would be a lot more entertaining.
The point is that if the game knows I'm waving my arms all crazy doesn't mean it's any better than if it didn't.
Re: BROKEN CONSOLES. I've lost an early generation PS2 and an early generation Xbox 360. Neither of these incidents colored me against that particular gaming system, although the Xbox was a heck of a lot easier to have replaced.
Sony as a manufacturer is notorious worldwide for fragile electronics prone to early failure. The Playstation 2 is several times more failure-prone than any era of Xbox 360. Everyone should remember that.
Of course, I'm on my third 360 and they've all been replaced for free and relatively quickly. I can't complain, and it doesn't really have any bearing on the quality of the experience you get when you actually use the thing, anyway.