6 logos we'd rather see on the Wii

Today, Nintendo announced a partnership with the American Heart Association that’ll promote healthy lifestyles through “Active-Play” and emblazon the AHA’s Heart Check logo on the Wii itself, as well as other select software. Surely, this gives the Wii a leg up over the encroaching competition from PlayStation’s Move and Microsoft’s Natal, but how does this affect you and me?

Above: If this floats your boat, head on over to the partnership’s new website! Oh, and remember to take your Centrum Silver and call your grandson

After some careful deliberation, we’ve come to the conclusion that it doesn’t. Sure, it’ll definitely hold sway for grandparents on the market for a new console, and maybe even grab Nintendo a coveted commercial spot after Final Jeopardy. But when it comes to logos branded onto the Nintendo Wii, we can think of several dozen other emblems we would’ve rather seen.

This isn’t 2006 anymore, so the line “gamers don’t care about HD” no longer flies. The fact that the Nintendo DS is already on its fourth hardware iteration, yet the Wii has no plans to do anything but turn black is somewhat inexcusable. Especially when you consider that the only way you can currently see High-Def shots of what the Wii is absolutely capable of are via an illegal emulator?

Above: Even upsampled GameCube games look fantastic! Unfortunately, the only way to see it is to steal it

Nintendo: Allowing yourself to be outdone by Pirates is how the Pirates win.

See above. Not only is HDMI the closest thing we have to an industry standard, it wonderfully eliminates messy tangles and mass entertainment center confusion by relegating all audio and visual signals into a single lossless digital wire. And if there’s any piece of hardware available today that needs to get rid of a wire or two, it’s the Wii. Almost all of our new TVs seem to come equipped with three HDMI ports, and most of us have been sitting on one empty slot patiently waiting for some third console to fill it!

Sure, we admired the Wii and its initial focus on being solely a game device. But if watching movies on the Wii weren’t appealing to households, then why would Netflix have released a streaming disc for the system, while simultaneously acknowledging how underwhelming it is? Well, because there’s no reason the Wii shouldn’t receive the Watch Instantly technology afforded to everything else… even if it’s a lesser experience that translates to a pixilated mess of sub-DVD quality.

Okay, obviously not Xbox Live specifically, but some kind of over arching online infrastructure that eliminates friend codes, allows direct messaging, and gave friends the ability to view progress across multiple games. Microsoft has set the bar high enough that it turns out, yes, gamers are willing to pay extra money for a premium online service. Especially one that gets rid of Wi-Fi dropouts, inabilities to connect, and all those other tech farts that occur more on Wii than any other console.

[Folding@Home] Hey, we believe that there are plenty of games on the Wii that could benefit from a fantastic online experience. Unfortunately, it doesn't have one and the time between Zelda and Mario games is a long one indeed. Most of us can’t deny that the Wii is our least played console. So, after we’re done collecting all 120 stars in Mario Galaxy 2, why not let it fold protein instead of collecting dust. It may lack the efficiency of doing it on a PC or PS3, but at least performing computationally intensive molecular simulations is infinitely more beneficial than pretending waggle minigames are going to lead to a healthier lifestyle.

Back in the NES days, no game made it US shelves without the “Nintendo Official Seal of Quality,” a golden stamp that at least implied the game had been put through its paces, evaluated, and approved by Nintendo something you can take pride in both playing and purchasing. Now, we’re not saying Target Terror, Ninjabread Man, and Game Party would fail to meet said quality standards, but nowadays the only thing Nintendo has to put on their boxes to let consumers know something’s worth their time and money is Mario.

May 17, 2010