We Miss the Spirit of Experimentation that Drove Nintendo’s WiiWare and 3DS eShop Stores
Nintendo isn’t struggling by any definition of the word. Sure, you can find an op-ed or two about how the Switch is underpowered in 2023 or what have you, but the sales figures suggest the general public doesn’t mind that so much, and even more importantly, the software releasing for the last-gen console is selling, too. The quality of some key, long-term series has never been higher than on the Switch, it has the kind of robust third-party support Nintendo hadn’t enjoyed for decades outside its handheld platforms, and again, even with Microsoft and Sony moving into the next generation of hardware, the Switch is doing numbers all over the world.
And yet, there’s something to lament about this generation, and we’re getting a reminder of it with next week’s closure of the 3DS eShop. For all of the Switch’s success in bringing out the best in some series (Kirby, Fire Emblem) and reviving others long left fallow with new, fantastic entries (Metroid Dread), some of Nintendo’s experimental spirit of the past is gone. That’s not to say they aren’t trying anything new or ambitious—this is the console that kicked off with Breath of the Wild, after all—but that the focus is entirely on the Big Stuff these days, and the experimental spirit that powered their digital forays on the Wii and DSi are missing from the modern catalog.
When Nintendo shut down purchases on the Wii shop in early 2019, they were cutting off access to a host of classic titles living on the Virtual Console, but they also closed everyone off from the many WiiWare games hosted on the service. These days, digital releases are just that, with no fancy names, but the Wii’s digital storefront arrived at a time when this was a new concept: the Playstation 3 had Minis, the Xbox 360 had Xbox Arcade, and the Wii had WiiWare. Like with the Minis and Arcade, there was a feeling out process happening, and the volume of digital-only games wasn’t what it is today, but even in this early time there were some real gems.
Often, WiiWare featured smaller games with an intriguing concept, ones that either would have died at retail because of the price range a physical game requires, or never been approved for a shot at a store shelf in the first place. On the Wii, however, they were priced between $5 and $15, and part of the idea was to create an avenue for smaller developers to get a chance to shine—Gaijin Games (now Choice Provisions) got their start there with the Bit.Trip games, but it also ended up as a path for established studios to get a retro revival going. Konami put out retro-styled Gradius, Castlevania, and Contra games, and Hudson Soft a Bomberman, Adventure Island, and Alien Crush sequel, while Capcom revived the NES-era Mega Man with Mega Man 9.
The service is how Nintendo first brought the wonderful Art Style games to North America: the first round of this kind of game (known then as bit Generations) released on the Game Boy Advance, but in Japan only. Those concepts were revisited and new ones drawn up for a series of digital releases on the Wii. Many of them were puzzle games, but thoughtful and different ones: Cubello had you using the IR pointer of the Wii Remote to aim blocks that you’d fire at a puzzle made of more blocks; it wasn’t as easy as matching colors, as the core of cubes would spin every time it was struck. Rotohex had you rotating the play area, attempting to create hexagons out of triangles that were falling onto the screen. Rotozoa had you playing as a microscopic organism with tentacles, attempting to traverse your environment and grow by touching other organisms of the same color, again through rotation.
The jewel of the bunch was Orbient, though: you’re controlling a small star, in the hopes of it becoming a much larger star. How large depends on the level in question. You move via a combination of gravity and anti-gravity, deployed with the A and B buttons, You’ll propel yourself through space, finding yourself caught up in the gravitational pull of larger objects, hoping to avoid collisions, absorbing smaller celestial objects until you’re large enough to “eat” more and more of what’s around you. It’s a beautiful little game, and the kind of experiment you just don’t see Nintendo attempt anymore.
The Art Style games weren’t the only thing Nintendo put on WiiWare, though: it was their shop and concept at a time before digital shops were a given success story, so they supported the hell out of it. MaBoShi’s Arcade was three small games in one, and while it was a single-player experience in the sense you could play only one of those three at a time, it could also be played by two others alongside you, and what happened in one of those games would impact the others. It was weird, ambitious and with depth despite the simplicity, and also kind of impossible to explain to someone looking for a game at Target or whatever. In other words, it was a perfect title for WiiWare.
Bonsai Barber was a game developed by Martin Hollis of GoldenEye 007 fame where you gave haircuts to plants. Mesmerizing! Excitebike: World Rally is the definitive version of the classic Excitebike formula, which is the kind of thing you could charge $10 for digitally but probably not release in stores for holiday 2009. Fluidity is a physics puzzle platformer where you control a small amount of water that you’ll slosh around the screen. You, Me, & the Cubes was a collaboration between Nintendo and Kenji Eno’s studio, FYTO—Eno was a Japanese musician and game designer whose previous studio, Warp, developed the games Enemy Zero and D. Within, the focus is on balance, which you’ll achieve by thinking about physics: you have to fling tiny people onto cubes, and hope that it doesn’t upset the balance in a way that causes them all to collapse. Again: not the kind of little game you could do at retail, but one you’d remember playing a decade-and-a-half later.
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