Nintendo Nostalgia Pt. 2

I left off with my purchase of the beloved silver Nintendo DS Lite, which was not only cool for its wireless connection for multiplayer, but it had a touchscreen! How cool is that? This was obviously pre-iPhone, and the touchscreen was pressure based, not capacitive, like today's touchscreens. But for that time, this was one of the coolest aspects. I don't remember what I first played on the DS, but some of my favorites were Kirby Super Star Ultra, Drawn to Life, and later, Sid Meyer's Civilization Revolution.

Civ Rev was a significant step in my video gaming career because it was one of the first strategic world simulating games I ever put a large amount of time into. I had achieved a new level of gaming, a more serious game with more thinking involved than the typical platform games of my past.

Moving on now from the DS and finishing off the Nintendo saga, enter: the Nintendo Wii. Nearly every household with children had a Wii at some point, probably a Christmas gift, that's where my family got ours, a Christmas gift from Santa a couple years after the console's release. The Wii had huge appeal to families for many reasons; great marketing, family interaction, physical movement, family-friendly game selection (Nintendo has for a long time had a market on having almost exclusively family friendly games), reasonable price, high tech appearance. The list goes on, but the bottom line here is that between the years of 2006 and 2009, Christmas morning included swinging Wii remotes around hitting virtual tennis balls for an enormous percentage of US families, including my own.