As a child of the 80s, I’ve been playing Nintendo games for most of my life, starting with the original NES. Indeed, I’ve never felt the need to own a console made by any other company. Still, I’m not a huge video gamer; after the SNES, I didn’t buy another new console until the Wii released. The Wii, however, was awesome enough to draw me back into gaming.
So what are the best games I’ve played on it so far?
- Wii Sports (followed by Wii Sports Resort) may be a packaged game, but it really showed off the new system well. Once I got my Wii, I spent the next week with a sore arm from playing too much Wii Tennis.
- Paper Mario 2: the Thousand Year Door. Yes, this is a Gamecube game. One of the nice things about the Wii is that it plays Gamecube disks; you can even plug in the old Gamecube controllers if you don’t want to use the Wii’s classic controller. Since I never had a Gamecube, one thing I did after getting my Wii was start trying out some of the games I missed, and this one quickly became one of my favorite games of all time.
- Donkey Kong Country. Going back even further here, this time to my favorite game on the Super Nintendo! Although I had a SNES hooked up at the time, with this game in it, it was still worth downloading again from the Wii shop for one simple reason: the saves. In the original game, you have to get to the save point in each level before you can save your game, so it’s a pain to quit before reaching the halfway point. Additionally, it only remembers what you’ve found, not your lives. The virtual version lets you save at any time and remembers your lives as well, so you can stock up in the first world and then do a straight shot through the game.
- Trauma Center. There are actually several Trauma Center games for the Wii – the third, Trauma Team, just released in May 2010 – but the first two play very similarly, with the main difference being the addition of a second player. This is an extremely intense game; I’ve described it as being the medical version of the show “24″, and have easily had multi-hour sessions. Easy earns its spot on the list.
- New Super Mario Brothers. Super Mario games have been around forever, but (with the possible exception of Paper Mario 2) I’ve never seen anything to beat Super Mario 3. (Part of that, of course, could be that I like the old 2D platformers; I never really cared for the 3D games). Thus, it gives me pleasure to pay this game a very high compliment: it plays exactly like Mario 3! Well, not exactly.. for one, you can have up to four people playing at the same time (with often hilarious results) but it feels just like that classic game. After being quite disappointed with Super Paper Mario, I was a little hesitant about this one, but I’m happy to say it lives up to the hype and is easily one of the top games made so far.
Get a new Wii? Any of the above games is a great choice to start playing. Get to it!