So I Bought a Wii U in 2023

so I bought a Wii U in [Music] [Music] 2023 hey everybody and welcome back to another episode of cop boox so as I mentioned I just recently bought a Wii U a lot of things led to this decision but before I get into the details of the experience of playing it now in 2023 I thought I would go through a bit of my history with the system so I've been a Nintendo guy since I got my N64 and I think 1998 I was always really loyal to the brand and never really felt I needed to get anything else besides that I kind of H of PlayStation and Sega but when I was a kid didn't matter it was all Nintendo all the time though the first time I really truly wavered away from that was because of two games the first game was Battlefront on the PS2 that was the first time where I was like well gosh okay maybe some of these other systems might have some games that I want to play okay realistically what I was saying is why didn't they bring this to the GameCube whyn't they going to bring Battlefront to the GameCube but the one that really sold me was the first time I played Halo Combat Evolved on the Xbox and I was like wa this game is incredible and it still is but that never really fully strayed me away I still was like you know what all I need to do is get the newest Nintendo console surely I'll keep up with what's going on I love the Wii I love the GameCube I love my 64 so when they announced the Wii U although I thought the name was kind of weird I of course was like well yeah it's the next Nintendo console it's their first one in HD this is going to be incredible we're going to get all these first party titles now playing in HD with online gaming and stuff like that oh yeah I was ready for the future I remember leaving Thanksgiving dinner early that year to get down to the mall for Black Friday sales like right at midnight so I could Scamper in there and I managed to snag myself a white Wii U and I did love that thing when I first got it but of course the first thing thing that I kind of noticed is that the launch lineup was a little bit weird it didn't have a whole lot of stuff that Drew me in but it did have Batman Arkham City which was great that was a game I had been meaning to get around to for a long time so I was super excited to play that then just a short time after getting the Wii U I ended up getting a better job and I was making more money and I ended up going in on a PS4 a couple of my friends already had one so I picked one up so I could play some games with them and that quickly became my main system that's how I was playing everything I was playing through Uncharted I was playing Grand Theft Auto I was playing Call of Duty I was sucked in and I was sitting there and I totally bought Into The Narrative of oh man the Wii U was such a failure it doesn't matter that system was just a total knock and I just joined on the hate wagon that everybody was doing while I had one sitting in my home what was the final nail in the coffin for me is when I traded in my Wii U to get an Xbox One and I loved my Xbox One it had all the stuff I wanted to play on it it had Halo it had banjo it had Minecraft I was just loving it to death so between my PlayStation and my Xbox I didn't feel a need to be part of the Nintendo hype anymore and to be fair there wasn't a whole lot of games that they were launching on the Wii U that really captured my attention at the time the struggle of the Wii U is a little bit of a difficult one because most of it kind of Falls to a bit of poor planning and just marketing that kind of fell through with how they went about it I think Nintendo kind of struggled to really get the message across of how different it really was from the Wii because they were so afraid of people going well that's not a Wii I don't want it so they kind of overcorrected in the other direction and went don't worry still a Wii Just a better one I the way it was a struggle for the poor system going forward from that point my main relationship with Nintendo was Retro Gaming I would go back and play like the old Mario parties or you know some N64 with some friends when we got together that was kind of most of the time that I would engage with Nintendo at that point I had kind of fallen off I was even so disconnected from Nintendo that I didn't even get a switch at launch I watched the announcement I was excited I was excited there was a new Zelda game but I didn't bother to get one I had a couple friends who did but I just didn't and that was the first time I had ever missed a Nintendo console at launch which is saying a lot and then especially when I did get my switch man I was just ragging on that thing to death it was the easiest joke to make in the world because the switch was such an incredible system the only brief period of time where I engaged with the Wii U again was after Smash Brothers ultimate was announced because we were playing a lot of Smash 4 leading up to the hype of ultimate so of course once ultimate came out we immediately packaged the Wii U up and put it away so what brought me back around to buy a Wii U in 2023 well funny enough it's because I was setting up my Wii I had been playing it a little while back and wanted to pull it out and play some games again but when I put the disc in the reader was just so loud and it was having reading issues it was struggling the port system was just not doing well and I was thinking about how I wanted to fix it if I wanted to figure out how to do the cleaning for it or if there was a part that needed replacement and I'd also considered getting one of the HDMI converters for the video output on the Wii cuz I thought that that would be kind of nice and more convenient to be able to hook it up their HDMI and while mulling all over this and trying to figure out the time and the skill and the pricing a little light bulb went off my head and I was like well man if you want to hook up something that plays Wii games to an HDMI she just get a Wii U and plus there's probably a few games on there I'd want to get that and something that really pushed me over the edge was realizing that they had DS games on the Virtual Console which I was really interested in experiencing in sort of a sit down and play on the couch experience the most important thing that really made me pull the trigger was I realized that the Wii U was the only original Nintendo console that I didn't have I have everything else from the NES all the way up to the switch but I didn't have a Wii U so that was it it was settled I scoured about looking for pricing and plans went to my local game store and ended up picking up this guy he has an 8 GB white Wii U a lovely little system I love the look that it has I find that the system itself is not quite as interesting or appealing as say the Wii or especially something like the GameCube but I don't think there's anything offensive about it I managed to pick up the system a game and a controller for around 160 bucks which I'm sure I could probably get it for a better deal if I looked around somewhere else but I was pretty satisfied with what I got so I got home set it up got ready and then realized that the GamePad was dead and they had not given me the charger so I went back down got back in the car went back to the Retro store picked up the cable came back again and then there we go okay all right time to set up my Wii U but of course there was another problem I realized that my Gamepad wouldn't stay charged I could plug it in fully charge it up and then it would die in like less than five minutes which is not good Apparently that is something that is known to happen to gamepads is sometimes the batteries can fault after time so I ended up going online and Scavenging around eBay found the battery that goes into the Wii U gamepad ordering one of those and the micro screw that goes with it so I could replace the battery here like this yeah it's this thing this is the battery for the Wii U gamepad bet you never seen one of those before probably didn't even think about it so after all was said and done I had some games I was downloading some of my old titles and I was finally on on my Wii U go like this [Music] cool the menu has so much charm it is very clearly part of the Wii family I love all the little floating pieces in the background on the menu and all of it works so well with the most important part the game pad for its size it's shockingly comfortable especially since I have pretty large hands and the small details on this thing really give it a lot of charm I mean look at this thing it looks straight out of the early 2010s it's got that touchscreen tablet thing it's got a camera it's got a TV remote button which is pretty cool All Things Considered but this is so like of its time of an all-in-one device and while it's kind of weird I do respect them for trying I always loved how you could see all the Miis on either screen when you're looking at the menu so you can kind of see people talking and posting on meerse oh man I miss meerse it's too bad that it's never going to come back I'll never know what that guy thinks about the water in Mario Odyssey it's nice having all these icons there so you can see all your games and see all those things and if you want to you can add folders do you hear that Nintendo you can add folders do you hear that Nintendo switch this system has folders you can even change the color of them which I think is kind of neat one big downside though is the storage they only released two versions of this console and the white one is only at 8 GB yikes that is small and even their deluxe version which cost a little bit more on launch the Black version of the Wii U came only with 32 GB to be fair a lot of games from nintend I know at that point weren't super huge but if you wanted to download more than a couple digital titles you were totally out of look the good news is you can get just about any USB or external hard drive and format it to work as extended storage I ended up picking up a 128 GB one so I can actually fit some titles on this system making M on this thing is also incredibly fun especially with the camera option mostly because it works terribly you could even do a video call through the Wii U chat system which was wild although unfortunately isn't working anymore so uh no phone calls for me I think I did it a grand total of once with my original Wii U the system also had a huge Powerhouse of doing non-slit screen multiplayer on the same console not many games took advantage of it but those that did having one player on the screen and another on the GamePad made it a pretty cool experience not to mention the general ability to play most games just on the GamePad being able to move the game off the main screen and bring it with you was a pretty novel experience back then even if you could barely make it into the other room before the connection was lost it's very easy to see Nintendo was already thinking about the concepts that would lead to the Nintendo switch a lot of what the switch brings to the table is just iterating on something that seems more of like a tech demo with the Wii U oh by the way did I mention that this thing has an entire Wii in it and not just to play the games but the menu too it's an entire Wii it also means that the Wii has an HDMI hookup now to be fair it's not really that much higher quality it's still outputting in its same resolution but it is an easy way to hook up Wii games to a modern television so it may not be the highest quality but I do love the ease of access and on top of having a whole Wii in here you could also just use Wii remotes with a lot of Wii U games that was a really smart move considering just about everybody and their grandmother had a wiii so not only having a new console but most likely an entire stack of controllers already good to go was a great idea but thankfully for those who wanted a more traditional controller experience they released the Pro Controller I forgot how much I love this thing it's got a higher right stick which is interesting because I feel like they were like okay Sony's got their sticks on the bottom Microsoft's got like the alternating sticks what are we going to do I'll just put them all on the top I guess I don't know you know so it was sort of just like each system had their own stick placements to be fair I also believe that part of that was so you would have the dead and the buttons next to each other to sort of simulate Super Nintendo and general retro controls which I am a big fan of and speaking of Xbox a huge reason I love this controller is that the form factor reminds me a lot of a classic Xbox 360 controller which to this day I still consider one of the best controllers ever made the thing is though this didn't have any analog triggers to be fair the we didn't have any analog triggers Triggers on any of its controllers I think the only system that Nintendo has ever released with analog triggers is the GameCube guess they just did it too good on those can't really iterate past Perfection this controller also has an insane battery life lasting up to no joke like 80 hours on a single charge but I didn't pick up this controller at first since they are still a bit pricey but I still wanted a second controller so we could play multiplayer games so I picked up this the Afterglow Wii U controller it was a third party Pro Controller that sold for noticeably less than official Pro I'm sure that we're used to seeing these type of things from aort of game systems especially back in the early 2010s how is this system already over a decade old I picked this up for a few reasons the main one being it was only $5 at the store I bought my Wii U from so that was an easy get the other reason is that funny enough I had this exact controller back when I had my original Wii U for a budget controller I think it does just fine the button placements don't feel perfect but overall I think it's decently comfortable my biggest issue with it though is that it tries to emulate analog triggers which forist system that does not support that is just feels strange however a big plus for me is one of the main selling points of this controller this little button here when you press it uh the controller lights up it is nothing but a novelty but I love it the most important thing about all this though is the games Library I started by checking my eShop purchases and promptly redownloading everything that I had it was time to stock up since the eShop was going down in March I bought the system just slightly before the cuto off so I made a few purchases good news though for anyone who gets a Wii U now that even if you can't purchase anything new on the eShop you could still redownload the games you've already purchased at least as of this video you still can one good news about Wii U games though is their library of physical games are still a little bit cheaper thanks to the fact that they're not big on the market yet and that there's a lot of games that were reported over and upgraded for the switch we'll get to my digital titles in a little bit but first I want to walk you through all the physical games that I have right now let's go take a look at the collection so the first game that I picked up was Hyrule Warriors this is a great great game it's one that I bought on my original Wii U back in the day but I didn't really ever get around to playing very much of it I always thought it was super super fun though it's a really good hack and slash sort of Style game that is just a lovely lovely version of the Dynasty Warrior series the best part about it is I got this game for about $8 which I think is a pretty good deal for a game like this it's probably because it's on the switch and it was a pretty widely produced game so there's probably plenty of copies sitting around the next game is probably my favorite one that I have on the system so far and that's Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze so I am a huge Donkey Kong fan I have been for a very long time big fan of the country Series dk64 this is an interesting one because this is the last Mainline Donkey Kong game we've ever gotten in the series The only thing we've had since then is the switch Port of this exact game albeit with Funky Kong in it but this is one of the finest if not the finest games you can get on the Wii U it is an incredible 2D platformer I love it to death um although I'm sure most of you have heard about it at this point and I'm hoping that we have another new Donkey Kong on the way soon uh this franchise is so so so so wonderful and it was also the comeback of some of my favorite characters like Dixie Kong I really loved how they implemented a lot of the Kongs in this one with being able to use different moves depending on who you had with you whether it was Diddy or Dixie or cranky and the way the levels are laid out it's a good challenge these are the kind of levels where when you play them they may be difficult but when you fail it feels like it's your fault and you're just using that to get better at the game I also want to take this opportunity to point out one of my weirdly favorite things about Wii U games and that is the weird rounded Edge that the discs have it's it's smooth it's such a weird detail but I've always loved that about Wii U games that they have this sort of strange rounded Edge to it next is Nintendo Land I think this is a must have for any Wii U owner mostly cuz one you can find it for a pretty good price if you look around and on top of that it is a perfect example of what the game pad was intended to do to be fair I think that this should have been a packin game like Wii Sports but at the end of the day whatever you know it is what it is I think it would help push the system a little bit more but it is a great great great title that shows off what the game pad could do what asymmetrical gameplay can do for this system with up to five players and it's one I would still have people over and play today I would love to see Nintendo take another crack at a game like this obviously you can't do it quite the same due to the way the switch is but one two switch was lacking in the ways that Nintendo Land was thriving moving on to the next one so this one was a very specific pickup uh it's Call of Duty ghosts now I'm not a big Call of Duty guy I played a little bit of Black Ops 3 when it came out and a tiny tiny bit of like zombies on some of the other games and stuff like that part of the reason I wanted this is just mostly for the novelty of what it is it is a Call of Duty game a full-fledged Call of Duty game on the Wii U and that is so strange uh at some point I want to get a copy of Black Ops 2 on the Wii U as well because I hear that there are people that are still playing online on that which is insane I haven't been able to find a match yet on Call of Duty ghost I have a feeling the servers might be down which wouldn't shock me cuz I never hear about this game at all wasn't this the one where they were like oh look at the fish look how HD the fish are this is the kind of thing where uh I have it purely so when someone walks in my home they go is that a Call of Duty on the Wii U and I can go yes yes it is all right this is basically a required game if you own a Wii U because you can find it just about anywhere it is New Super Mario Brothers U I got the version that has a new Super Luigi you included on it because that's actually most the reason I bought this um I have beaten this game I at least like two or three times uh it's it's a good title it's a fun game it's well made and I'm sure as many of you feel it's just that by the time this came out we were so tired of the new Super Mario Brothers format that it didn't feel fresh it didn't feel Innovative it just felt like more the same and what it's more of is good it's just that it's still the same and of course somehow they still managed to toss it out on the switch in a $60 version of the game but that's a conversation for another time what I do want to point out about this though is uh when I bought this it was in a white case uh instead of a standard blue Wii U one and I was like well shoot I want them all to be blue you know it's a Wii U game and I couldn't figure out like I didn't know where I would look for finding a replacement case maybe I would just buy another Wii U game and swap it out but then I'd have that deficit problem again um maybe I could find a blank case somewhere either way I hadn't figured it out yet but what ended up coming in handy is it turns out that the movie Gold Member Austin Powers Gold Member comes in this blue case so the case that you are seeing on my copy of Mario U right now this blue case is originally my Austin Powers Gold Member DVD case and I think that is incredibly funny so here's the white box that Mario U originally came in this is a DVD I've had forever I bought it when the movie came out which was oh God uh oh God in 2002 man this has been out for a while I was just kind of sitting there trying to figure out what to do about it and uh we recently rearranged a little bit of our uh home and I was moving the movie shelf I saw the Gold Member case and I was like oh my God that's the same color so I swapped it out and I think it looks great like if you walked in um well aside from that say I was going to say that it would be indistinguishable from a DVD case aside from the fact that there's a DVD sticker for uh gold member on there but I think that that's a pretty funny little uh situation there that kind of came out to my benefit okay enough of that the final game I have physically is of course Super Smash BRS for Wii U this is such an important game to me because I feel like it kind of got forgotten when ultimate came out understandably so I mean ultimate is I mean it's ultimate that's that's it's literally in the name of the game I sunk a lot of hours into this with my roommates at the time when ultimate was like you know coming out when the announcement had been made we were all getting back into the Smash Brothers hype and this was the game that we played a lot it's a really solid Smash Brothers and I feel like a lot of people don't give it as much love as it deserves it's not quite as revolutionary as melee and it doesn't have something quite as distinct as the Subspace Emissary like brawl but it's an important stepping stone in the Smash Brothers franchise especially considering the fact they managed to fit it on a 3DS I don't have it installed on mine but uh you know for visual purposes but that made this game such a standout title cuz you could like play on your 3DS and on the Wii U at the same time with your friends you had that mode where you could hook this up and use it as a controller on the Wii U for this game which is absurd to me that that was a concept I think it's cool uh and thought maybe in execution not so much but I think this is an important piece for anybody to have in their Wii U collection because this game is just a lot of fun it may gets overshadowed in every way by ultimate but for the fact that you can find it for a pretty good price I think I paid maybe around like $9 for it I think that's well worth the price all right and uh that's all of my physical games for now uh I intend on expanding my collection my next one that I want to grab is breath of the wild we'll see if that happens we'll see what comes next all depends on what I find while I'm sitting around but I'm really happy with the collection that I have going so far and I'm excited to find more I'd say now is definitely the time to snag Wii U games before they they hit big prices the fact that you could still get some of these for a good deal is definitely worth your time this whole system is still a little underrated and worth the investment you may notice that my background is different and that is because it is a custom theme that I installed since I modded my Wii U yeah as it turns out this system is incredibly easy to mod if you follow the right instructions all you need is some storage and an SD card and thanks to this I was able to install an eShop replacement app that allows me to download any title that was previously available on eShop so of course I use this to beef up my digital library especially in the Virtual Console Department I don't intend on going through my entire library but I'll touch on some of the games and experiences of playing them on this system the first ones I want to focus on are Mario Kart DS and Mario 64 DS I really love the novelty of being able to play DS games on my TV I'm pretty shocked by how decent they look even when they're blown up on the big screen the game pad gives a great amount of options for the DS games and the ergonomics for it I prefer having separated top and bottom screens at least for the games I tend to play but for the more touchscreen heavy games they do give you multiple layouts that you can try to figure out what the best way is is to play these games this is probably the only time Nintendo can get this specific with Ds emulation it's pretty neat I of course also grabbed a lot of N64 games my only real issue is some games are strangely dark I think it's an emulation issue I'm not 100% sure and while it may not be a perfect visual emulation for these games we booted up Mario Kart 64 and had quickly forgotten about it and had a blast I may have these games on other systems already but I do love the convenience of having all of it right there on the Wii U it's also great having some Game Boy advanced and Super Nintendo games that haven't made their way over to the switch yet though I'm hoping most of them are on their way we do have games like Metroid zero Mission which is currently only available on the Wii U although I wouldn't be shocked if that game's coming to the switch pretty soon there are also some great Wii titles that you could download if you don't own them physically it's got warri Land shake It And even the Metroid Prime Trilogy I also have a good handful of just standard Wii U games downloaded on my console one of them that I'm happy to have here is the original Super Mario Maker i l this game when it came out and spent a lot of time creating levels and having a lot of fun playing the ones that were uploaded although sadly with the network shutting down in 2024 it's a little bit of a bummer cuz I don't know if I'm going to ever get to play these levels again guess I should get some time in on it now and man the Wii U is an incredible Zelda machine between the Virtual Console and the HD ports you can play every single Mainline Zelda game on this console aside from tears of the kingdom of course and yeah I think that's because we forget that breath of the wild was originally a Wii U game it was shown off as a Wii U game it was released on the Wii U the same day that the switch launched so a lot of people kind of forgot about it that's right arguably the flagship title on the Nintendo switch has a totally functional and lovingly made version for the Wii U I considered getting the digital version of it but I much rather wait and NAB myself a physical copy it was such an important turning point for Nintendo and it deserves to be treated as such plus I love the novelty of having a game like this on my shelf the final title I ever purchased on the eShop was Twilight Princess HD this game was one of the biggest reasons I wanted to get a Wii U I had been hunting around for a gang view copy of this for a while and holy heck do these get expensive I didn't want to play on the Wii version cuz it's got the waggle and that's that's personally just not my thing I really wanted to snag this game since this was one of the Zelda games that I have never touched before I love breath of the wild but I was itching to play some classic dungeon style Zelda I'm only just getting into the game so far I just finished freeing the light Spirits from the Twilight realm and I'm headed to the temple in Lake halia I've love the experience so far and I have a feeling this game will end up at the top of my list when it comes to favorite Zelda [Music] games for all the great things the Wii U did it was overshadowed by some impressively terrible marketing leading this to become their successful Home console ever selling around 8 million less than the GameCube and a whopping 87 million below the Wii though that's not to say all the marketing was a Miss I do think back finally to the early days of Nintendo directs when regie fiz and the late great Satur aada were still around both of them are an absolute Legends who played a huge part in keeping the energy and the fun going during the tough time for Nintendo so what I recommend getting a Wii U in 2023 absolutely it has a pretty great library of games and with the Retro Market being as fix as it is now is the time to jump in the games and the systems are still decently affordable and I worry that it won't be like that for too long plus if you decide to mod your system there's access to a brilliant amount of digital titles and Virtual Console ports not to mention again this thing has an entire Wii in it so that opens up that whole back catalog to you plus if you ever wanted to mod a Wii you can mod the Wii inside of the Wii U I can't stress enough how cool that is the switch was such a huge Saving Grace for Nintendo and I was happy to move on from this system at the time I think many of us were and understandably so but now as the switch is entering its final years it makes it a lot easier to look past the struggles of the system and enjoy all the charm the Wii U has to offer I'm quite excited to have this console to collect for and I consider this a special one since after picking this up I will now own every Nintendo console from the NES all the way to the switch it feels like the final piece of a massive puzzle now the most important question is what is your relationship to the Wii U Were you over and done with it when it came out or are you a Die Hard Defender let me know down in the comments I'm excited to find out thank you so much for watching this episode of cop boox and we will see you next [Music] time

Channel: KotBox

Views: 381,408

Keywords: wii u, wiiu, bought, 2023, retro, collection, kot box, kotbox, mario, zelda, donkey kong, call of duty, hyrule warriors, new super mario bros, nsmbu, tropical freeze, cod, nintendoland, nintendo land, smash bros, smash wii u, smash 3ds, nintendo switch, switch, review, retrospective, nostalgia, botw, breath of the wild

Id: MZVriTVxxsU

Length: 25min 19sec (1519 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 11 2023