Nintendo Land and hindsight

I picked up Nintendo Land for $10 the other day, and I've played a bit of it with my wife and on my own. It's a fun game with a lot of neat gimmicks that have longer lifespans than I would expect from a bunch of mini-games. It's definitely a mini-game collection, but it feels meatier than most games I would describe like that.

When Nintendo Land first came out it was seen as a showcase of all the neat things you could do with the Wii U's gamepad. This turned out to be terribly true: it's just about all the neat things you could do with the gamepad.

The Wii U is dying at this point, and I think most of us can agree that the gamepad is pretty much a bad gimmick. I can't think of much that it could do that wasn't done on the DS or the Wii better, except for maybe Mario Maker. Even that game is something you could accomplish on a tablet - the TV display is just a nice bonus. Looking down at the gamepad while playing a game is a really awful experience, and the best thing about it is that I can play games with the TV off. But even then I just want a nice, powerful portable machine, not something locked to my living room

I loved the Wii, and I loved the DS. But combining the two was doomed from the beginning. Nintendo Land was supposed to be a shining light towards all of the new things you could do on the Wii U. Instead, it ended up showcasing almost everything interesting the Wii U could do, and with the benefit of hindsight we can see how limited the console truly is.