Nintendo Wii Review

The Wii is the cleanest example of a product winning on an idea rather than a specification. Inside it was barely more than an overclocked GameCube, with no high definition output in an era defined by it, and the games looked exactly that way. The remote changed who bought it. Wii Sports, bundled in the box, put tennis and bowling into retirement homes and family rooms that had never owned a console, and for two years the machine was impossible to find in a shop.

The problem is what happened after. Most owners played Wii Sports and little else, third parties shovelled cheap motion games onto it, and the genuinely great software, Galaxy, Skyward Sword, Xenoblade, Metroid Prime 3, reached a fraction of that audience. It is a landmark and a slightly hollow one: enormous reach, thin engagement, and a library whose best entries deserved a machine people kept switched on.