Topic: Have you ever been disappointed with your Nintendo purchase?

[Spak-Spang]

There have been plenty of negative posts and comments about the Wii U.  Some rightfully so, and others are not justified.  However, it got me thinking about Nintendo in general.


Have you ever been disappointed with your Nintendo purchase.  I am mostly interested in Hardware purchases not software, but if there is an interesting point you want to make with a software purchase or the software purchase included hardware, please include it.


For me I can only think of a few instances.  First I was disappointed with the initial DS purchase, because once the DS Light came out, I had to rebuy hardware.  The original DS was also overly lacking and I didn't expect to have such a hard time viewing the screen.  A very similar thing happened with my Gameboy Advanced Purchase, but I didn't regret it as much, because it still seemed useful, and I ended it keeping the original longer than the SP. 


For my console purchases I can say I have never really regretted any of the Nintendo systems.  I have found each to be interesting and fun.  I know many quote the N64 as the last great Nintendo system, and yet also a signal of Nintendo's doom...but to me that system was the top of Nintendo's creative era.  The Gamecube was also filled with great games that I would never want to ignore...or have not played. 


So looking forward though, I look at the Wii U, and I am confused by the product and don't know if I would want to buy it or not.  I do see great potential, but what is combining of the Tablet controller with the Wiimotes.  I feel like the system is trying to do too many things, but without a clear vision of what it is. 


Obviously, I do not regret the purchase, because I hadn't made one.  And if I do make it...I am sure some game would have pulled me in to purchase it. 


Those are my thoughts...how about yours? 

[Nemo]

The most disappointing hardware purchase is the 3DS. I got it for $250 and then they shortly dropped the price $80. Ya, I got some free games out of it, but it was a lot of free games I'd already bought and played a long time ago. Also... the two vertical lines/scratches that have formed from when the system is closed. I'm pretty disappointed that Nintendo didn't see that coming and do something about it. Eventually, there were some pretty fun games released (and certainly more to come), so I'm not disappointed software-wise.

[Oblivion]

I agree. I was MUCH more disappointed with the 3DS than the Wii U's launch. Honestly, I don't understand why the hate for the Wii U has been so much stronger compared to the 3DS.


For the record, I bought the 32GB Deluxe version with a copy of ZombiU, Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, and Scribblenauts Unlimited and I still do not regret it whatsoever.

[smallsharkbigbite]

I'm not sure disappointed is the right word, but I Wii could have been better.  Wii Sports was fun, so were some of the light gun games, but I never felt they truly made an in-depth game that greatly benefited from motion controls.  I had a Gamecube/Xbox the generation before and I much preferred the Gamecube despite it not receiving some multi-plat games.  I had a Wii/PS3 last gen and I much preferred the PS3.  Late in the generation I did pick up a bunch of $10 Wii games that were fun, so I wouldn't say it was a failure, but I feel it was a missed opportunity. 


Surprisingly, I really like the Wii U.  It feels like a return to the Gamecube roots to me with more standardized controls.  I use the off-screen gameplay alot since it's harder to utilize a TV with a family.  Nintendo games in HD is a big plus.  With Nintendo not being the leader, I expect them to take more game chances with the return of franchises and I expect more sales opportunities as they try to push their games into consumers hands.  The Gamecube had a players choice line a year after release, the Wii never really had a players choice line.  I also think that a couple of big 3rd party games will make it to the Wii U.  Remember Resident Evil with the Gamecube?  It was a perfect chance for Capcom to revitalize that series without going against Sony/Microsoft big hitters.  Plus, honestly I just don't have enough time to play games anymore.  The games for the Wii U are solid and maybe it won't get all the PS3 sequels I have, but I think Steam can supplement the Wii U and I don't currently plan on picking up a PS4. 

[Ceric]

GBA SP.  Such an unergonomic system.

[ejamer]

Getting a GBA at launch left me sorely disappointed with the screen quality. For a portable system, it was almost impossible to play on the move.  (Games and hardware were both good outside of that one issue... but it's no surprise that the Afterburner mod and later GBA SP releases with backlighting made big waves, allowing people to actually see the games they were playing.)

[Pixelated Pixies]

I too was pretty disappointed with my 3DS purchase, not only because the price dropped so steeply soon after it's release but also because there were very few games which interested me in the months that followed. Now the 3DS is a great system to own, but owning it at launch was a real bummer.

[MrPhishfood]

Disappointment usually happens when hype doesn't match reality. I've never bought in to all the hype so I've never really been disappointed.

I never really felt Nintendo owed me anything either.

[Adrock]

Hardware: No. That's a fairly big investment and I don't buy anything that pricey unless I'm comfortable paying for it. They've never been impulse purchases. When I buy Nintendo hardware, I know what I'm getting it for and I've never been disappointed as a whole in their first party offerings.

Games: A few. Skyward Sword is probably at the top of that list. I also paid more for the golden Wii Remote that is still in the box.

I regret not buying a Virtual Boy. Seriously. Just to have one.

[NWR_Neal]

I regret spending money on Paper Mario: Sticker Star, but I also would have coveted it until I played it and realized I hate it.

[lolmonade]

I bought a Virtual Boy back when it was still in stores. 
 
While I loved playing the thing, and had a lot of fun with Teleroboxer, Gravity Pinball, and the Wario game (forget the name offhand), playing it as often as I did gave me consistent headaches.
 
Also, the stand that came with it was a poorly made, thin plastic that would crack/break if you breathed on it hard.  If I were an adult and known better, I would have called Nintendo and asked them to replace it because of how lousy it was.

[BranDonk Kong]

3DS and Wii U unfortunately. The regret for the Wii U took a couple of months though, oh well.

[Ian Sane]

The most disappointing Nintendo game I've ever bought was Metroid: Other M.  I was even warned about it by people on this site but then others were saying it was great.  It was Metroid so I felt I had to try it for myself.

I was pretty annoyed when the GBA SP was announced because I really found the GBA screen hard to see and felt Nintendo pretty clearly jerked us around on that one.  I refused to buy the GBA SP in principle but was able to overcome visibility issues with the GB Player.  I distrust Nintendo on handhelds now and it is completely justified as they always have a superior revision in the works.  Never buy the first model.

But the Wii is the most disappointing Nintendo purchase I have ever made.  The only thing it had to distinguish it from the Gamecube was motion control which I hated.  If Xenoblade had been stuck in Japan it really would have felt like a waste of a purchase.  Motion control was like a disease infecting potentially great games.  The Super Mario Galaxy titles were awesome but still had waggle and those horrible manta ray levels.  I could not enjoy a game without some slippery imprecise waggle sticking its nose in the game.  I considered Nintendo to be the best at having responsive and intuitive controls.  The Wii threw all that out and I now see Nintendo as one of the least reliable companies for good controls.  The Wii also had last gen visuals, cookie cutter sequels, a focus on a casual audience I was not a part of, and terrible third party support.  It is the only time that I bought a non-Nintendo console during a generation.  I was so sick of the Wii's bullshit that I bought a PS3.  I own a PS1 and PS2 but bought then after the generation was over to grab some of the games I missed.  This time I felt it was clear that the Wii was failing to meet my needs and that I would have to effectively switch teams.  And I have not bought a Wii U and have virtually no interest in it at all because it seems to follow the same design as the Wii.  I realistically could not call myself a Nintendo fan these days as my tastes are way out-of-sync with Nintendo's current product and the Wii was the turning point.  It's a Nintendo product that was so disappointing that it made me stop liking Nintendo.

[Oblivion]

So you've always been like this?

[ThePerm]

i do remember him being pretty happy with Nintendo at some point. He complained about the lack of third party games during the gamecube era, but so far the gamecube was a better system then wii u is now.

it is quite fun to read Ian's old posts. They are pretty well put together, but they are never aware of whats coming. Like on the first page of his posts there is a good one about what the companies have to do to be successful. The first 3 years of the ps3 the system was a failure as far as sales. Despite this 3rd parties still made tons of games for it. Nintendo suffers the same fate and 3rd parties leave the system. Wii is successful and they decide to make games for it, and then despite the enormous userbase they sell horribly. Not because the Wii in particularly, but because they were a poorly executed game.

[Ian Sane]

Nintendo has worn me down over the years with their incompetence and destroyed the enthusiasm I used to have for them.  Realistically each Nintendo console has been inferior to its predecessor and the Wii was the breaking point for me.  Being a Nintendo fan is what I imagine it's like to be a fan for a sports team that used to be great but is now a perpetual bottom dweller due to years of mismanagement.

I was very optimistic going into the Gamecube as I assumed that Nintendo was going to bounce back and the N64's troubles were entirely due to the single mistake of going with cartridges.  Everyone makes mistakes, right?  Their first party games were amazing so I figured I could cut them slack on one mistake.  But then on the Cube I slowly learned that a company dumb enough to make such an obvious mistake like sticking with cartridges would also be incompetent in all sorts of other ways.  The N64 was easier to deal with because there was hope that things would improve next gen.  Once you lose that hope, Nintendo's bullshit is insufferable.

[TJ Spyke]

The N64 sticking with cartridges retrospectively was a bad idea, but look at what happened back when they made the decision. The PS1 was not yet a huge seller (when Nintendo made the decision), Saturn was not doing that well (though in Japan it was doing alright), 3DO was a failure, Sega CD was a failure, Jaguar CD was a failure. There wasn't much success with CD-ROMs for gaming.

[Ian Sane]

The N64 sticking with cartridges retrospectively was a bad idea, but look at what happened back when they made the decision. The PS1 was not yet a huge seller (when Nintendo made the decision), Saturn was not doing that well (though in Japan it was doing alright), 3DO was a failure, Sega CD was a failure, Jaguar CD was a failure. There wasn't much success with CD-ROMs for gaming.

Every other console was going with CDs and CD-ROM drives were becoming the standard for computers.  Nintendo was the sole holdout.  The logic of the Sega CD being a failure is EXACTLY the sort of logic I often see out of Nintendo, where they make a decision that will impact them for the next five years based on where things were six months ago.  They used this "at this exact moment" logic for online gaming and supporting HDTVs and looked like old fuddy-duddies within a year.  To me the most obvious reason to go with CDs was simply that they held WAY more data than a cartridge for a fraction of the price.  Anyone with half a brain would know that cartridges would be a hard sell not just to third party developers but customers as well.  How can you ask devs to make less money or customers to pay higher prices for games that can't do cool new stuff like FMV or redbook audio that literally EVERY OTHER COMPANY is offering?  They were banking everything on the notion that load times were so valued to everyone that we would give up functionality and pay more money.

Nintendo used to lead the videogame industry but I think around the N64 they mistook being a leader for being contrarian.  When Nintendo does something THEIR way it typically falls into one of three categories:

1. They're penny-pinching.  Cheaping out on something to save them a few bucks or over-charging to squeeze every penny out of us.  Nintendo will gladly throw away $1000 tomorrow for $10 today.

2. Their isolation has made them ignorant of what the rest of the industry is doing so they re-invent the wheel in an inferior way that no one likes when the proper and logical solution has already been done by others.  I've also hypothesized the possibility that it is arrogance instead of ignorance that fuels this and that they do things their own goofy way so as to admit to themselves that other companies can have great ideas.

3. They come up with something absolutely brilliant that nobody else has ever thought of and change videogames forever.  They have done this far more times than other companies have but this is still a rare occurance as these sorts of things are by their nature.  There are times where Nintendo is perhaps trying to achieve this and fails.

I don't like it when they do 1 or 2 and that seems to happen way more than 3.  3 shouldn't even be attempted without proper risk analysis.  Nintendo might think that they're capable of pulling industry-changing ideas out of their butt and that arrogance would also be a problem.  They absolutely shouldn't jerk us or their business partners around and shouldn't be ignorant of what everyone else is doing.  They should aim to do things right or do things better.  Doing things different is arbitrary if it provides no obvious improvement.

[alegoicoe]

My biggest disappoimnet with the WiiU is the lack of key titles Nintendo promised and never deliver in the time frame they originally said.

[Kytim89]

So far I am disappointed with the Wii U. I was initially excited that the Wii U would be powerful enough to attract a larger percentage of third party support than previous Nintendo systems. As time went I have been increasingly dissapointed with the Wii U. Although I hold out hope it, the PS4 is looking even better by the day.


Edit:


The Wii U must be really doomed if its number one fan is worried about?

[Sarail]

I was disappointed with the original GBA. Of course, Nintendo released the sidelit, and later on the backlit SP, and so I was then satisfied. But man, all of those times sitting underneath a hot lamp trying to play Castlevania: Circle of the Moon... ugh. So infuriating.

As far as software releases go, I was fairly burnt by DDR: Mario Mix and Star Fox: Assault. The former because I expected true DDR with a Mario/Mushroom Kingdom skin. The latter was a good game in parts, but I felt Namco tried a bit too hard for the majority. I wanted (and am still waiting) for a true sequel/prequel to Star Fox 64.

Though, I could go for a real sequel to Star Fox Adventures. I loved that game to no end. Ground-based, Zelda-inspired battle mechanics with Fox McCloud wielding a bo staff was pure SEX.

[rlse9]

I would have been disappointed by the original DS, I got one a couple weeks before the DS Lite was announced (which luckily ended up having a defective screen and was returned) and the system just felt like a prototype and not a finished product.  But I returned to the original and waited for the Lite to come out so it never became an issue.

The Wii was a disappointment in that it seemed like it had so much potential early in its life that never got realized.  No Pikmin, no great MLB game, and motion controls just didn't feel like they got as many interesting uses on the Wii as touch screen controls did on the DS.  I probably had as much fun with the Wii as any game system I've ever owned but at the same I expected more.

[pokepal148]

outside of bowsers inside story and mario kart 7 (no single player vs.  mode ruined the entire game for me) not really...

oh wait... wii play(I think that's a given)

[Adrock]

I judge Wii Play almost entirely on Tanks which I actually played last week so I definitely got mileage out of the game. It also came out at a time when Wii Remotes were hard to come by.

[shingi_70]

Probably the Gamecube. While it had a ton of great games its the biggest example other then the N64 of nintendo shooting themselves in the foot by using minidisc to save money.


I don't have a Wii U but i'm less disappointed with the system and more disappointed on how Nintendo has handled the thing.