Holding another wake for the Wii U – and the 3DS too

thesixthaxis.com:

It’s never easy saying goodbye, but video game consoles aren’t people, animals or favourite stuffed toys, so why get upset about it? With the closure of the Nintendo Wii U and 3DS online servers overnight, Nintendo has carved another date into their respective headstones, cutting them off from multiplayer gaming and pretty much any kind of online experiences for the remainder of their usable lives. There’s a reason it hurts, but it almost certainly isn’t because you were still playing on them every day. This is the loss of childhood, the loss of communities and the loss of experiences that you still cherish. This is getting older, and let’s face it, it sucks.

The Wii U was a full-on weirdo, taking the 3DS dual-screen aesthetic, translating it to the home console forum, and putting a gamepad in your hands that was bigger than a Steam Deck. Despite that, it remains one of my all-time favourites, and you only have to look at the number of great games that Nintendo brought across to the Switch to know it wasn’t the software’s fault. The hardware was odd, and people never got over that.

Its online component was classic Nintendo as well, with a bunch of Mii’s chatting away on the homescreen, and the ability to ‘chat’ via scrawls and doodles in one of the most cathartic ways of expressing yourself. As ever, it made Sony and Microsoft look like the dullest citizens in dullsville, and it’s still disappointing that the Nintendo Switch has similarly bland online features.

At the centre of those experiences were games like the original Splatoon, a title which made way more sense with the Wii U’s gamepad in tow, using the second screen to see how your team was doing, and choosing where to launch your character. Committed players held a final wake there before the servers were shut down, and that sense of loss was clear to see. Saying goodbye is never easy, but even more so when the console itself fundamentally still works exactly as it did before.

For me, the loss of Xenoblade