Back on the Wii

I somehow got a Nintendo Wii. The details don’t matter much—some combination of bad impulses and dumb luck—but there it was, this white console on the shelf, a controller that looked like it should be turning channels on a television set.

New Super Mario Bros Wii was what sealed it. Mario and Luigi together, four-player mode, level design so cleanly done you can feel every jump before you make it. Watching it play brought everything back—all those hours with Super Mario World, Pokémon, Secret of Mana, Zelda. Just thinking about these games is enough to get my heart rate up. This is why I wanted to play games in the first place.

I handed Sandra one of those weird vibrating controllers and we spent the afternoon jumping through levels, laughing when we hit each other, both dying on the same platform at the exact same moment and somehow finding it hilarious. Yoshi’s there, doing his thing. The whole experience is so purely, unapologetically Mario that it doesn’t need anything else.

What’s strange is how right it feels to play something that doesn’t apologize for what it is. Motion controls sounded stupid on paper. The graphics are clearly a step down. Nintendo basically said fuck it, we’re building something for ourselves, and it works. No grand reaching, no trying to compete with whatever else is out there. Just games that understand their job.

I have no idea what else the Wii has or which games are supposed to matter. I’ll figure that out eventually. For now, I’m just grateful to remember why any of this mattered at all.