Nintendo Peripherals

But wait, there's more!

The otherday I was watching normal TV for normal people, and was bombarded by a surprise gaming ad. What company could have possibly sunk enough marketing revenue to afford a spot on BBC, I wondered. It wasn't sandwiched between any landmark shows or anything, but it's presence on the most widely watched channel in the country was impressive enough. But hold your applause, it was just a Nintendo ad. Those people pretty much wrote the book on 'family friendly' so stations will easily roll over backwards to accept some that Nintendo money. (Luckily those same advertisers don't look at the Switch's online store to see the sorts of games that Nintendo are approving nowadays. There's literally an upcoming Doom parody called BDSM (Big Drunk Satanic Massacre.) Way to go Nintendo for expanding your horizons!)

The advert itself was focused on one of the more weird announcements from Nintendo's last Direct livestream; Ring Fit adventure. If you are somehow unaware, this was a game that picked up quite some traction with the way it seemed to be attempting to supplant Wii Fit as the go-to exercise game for middle age mothers. Using a plastic ring. Okay, sure it looks bendy, but I seriously doubt about the versatility of a plastic ring to hold your Joycons. Nintendo seemed sold enough to pimp this thing out to BBC, however, so I guess they must have faith. The whole thing got me thinking about the other peripherals Nintendo has committed to throughout the years, so that's what we're looking at today.

First, since we mentioned it, we should start with the good old Wii Fit balance board. This piece of kit was designed as an addendum to the motion-centric Wii kit and sought to empower mothers across the world with the power to partake in basic yoga. Their accompanying software also included a variety of workouts ranging from the simple routines that even I could get behind to the ones so excessive that even reading the description left me knackered. As the Nintendo Wii was so commercially popular due to it's marketing towards family units, it made absolute sense for Nintendo to actively attempt to appeal to all typical family demographics and Wii Fit was exceeding successful in this department. So successful, in fact, that Nintendo went onto release the Wii Fit Plus within a few years. In terms of actual numbers, Wii Fit was the third best selling game of 2008 earning over 4.53 million units sold. (That's a lot of balance boards!)

Let me get a little topsy-turvey on you for a moment as I return to the Nintendo Switch for a peripheral that I never partook in but have been forever fascinated by. Just what the heck is the Nintendo Labo anyway? Well, quite simply, it's a 'build-it-yourself' kit of cardboard for which players are expected to construct elaborate cardboard cradles to fit their Joycons and simulate a game. (Way to save money on materials and save the planet from an influx of plastic, Nintendo! Now if only you could do something about the size of Switch game cases...)The Labo is impressive not just in it's simplicity but in it's sturdiness. None of the designs require glue or cellotape in order to make the thing work, yet all are sturdy enough to withstand semi-constant use. (Just don't take it out in the rain, I guess.) I still hold issue with the excessive large price points for what is essentially a bunch of cardboard, but I suppose that's just classic Nintendo shenanigans nowadays, no one even questions them on it anymore.

Okay, so this next one isn't exactly a peripheral, but I feel it's worth bringing up at least once before I die. Who has heard of the Nintendo Virtual Boy? That's right, one of gaming's first, and least successful, forays into Virtual Reality, all the way back in the dinosaur age of 1995. Tech for this machine was being developed as far back as 1985, with Nintendo being excited about bringing the project to it's fullest fruition pretty much for the entire next decade. Once it was here, however, it was clear that things hadn't worked out exactly the way that Nintendo, or the world, had hoped. Due to limitations in the hardware and cost, only one colour could be represented within the Virtual Boy and somehow Nintendo decided that colour should be bright, mind-numbing, red. Also, developers didn't quite know how to make games for the thing or even what kind of games to make, so the console had one of the smallest libraries of any consoles ever. (I'm fairly certain that it's below 15 games.) The hardware had a head-stabilizing stand that required it to set on a table. (That's a big brain move.) and the whole thing looked incredibly unwieldly from the outside and felt incredibly uncomfortable from the inside. Amazingly, Nintendo managed to sell 910,000 units (according to their own data) before the thing was discontinued. I guess some people are masochists.

Now, I feel certain that I've discussed this next piece of hardware before, but I can't find the article so i'll just have to assume that I merely dreamt about writing it. Remember back in the height of the propaganda wars when Nintendo and Sega were wasting millions on disstrack commercials instead of making games? (It's better than just sending each other snide tweets like Sony and Microsoft.) It was in the midst of this conflict that Nintendo decided to drop their next peripheral that would determine the course of gaming history; The Power Glove. This ugly looking thing was based off an actually impressive design patent for a glove capable of detecting every movement of the hand down to finger flexture due to fiberoptic sensor's in the material. (For the late 1980's this was space tech!) The power glove, however, had to be mass produced, so much of that was stripped out for a more basic control scheme that was a lot less sensitive. The result? The thing was nigh on unplayable. The glove was supposed to simulate a traditional controller making for a viable replacement, but due to the imprecision of the sensors, you couldn't even play Zelda with this hunk of junk. Perhaps the most famous appearance of the Power Glove was in the Nintendo propaganda Fred Savage movie; The Wizard, in which the antagonist, Lucas, wields the tech and utters that most infamous of lines. "I love the Power Glove, it's just so bad!" (The line speaks for itself.)

Now let's talk about the humble gun. Wait what? Yeah, Nintendo have had a few of these over the years. From the classic NES Zapper back in 1985, Nintendo went on to implement their light gun technology into the 1992/93 Super Scope. Both of these weapons revolutionized the way that games could be made by ensuring that aiming no longer had to be handled exclusively by humble directional arrows. Now one could just point and shoot like god intended. Although there is no way that Nintendo could get away with something like that in the enlightened age of the 2000's onwards right? Mommy blogs the world over would just explode if they saw something like that, wouldn't they? Not so, it would seem, for Nintendo also supplied their Wii with an extensive amount of hardware. An old friend of mine even owned the Wii Zapper gun and said that it worked great on House of the Dead. (Wait a minute, they released 'House of the Dead' on Wii? Nintendo really know how to surprise me...) There was also the Wii Perfect Shot (Which is just a handgun) The Wii Shot Gun (Not a shotgun but a rifle) and the logic 3 Wii machine gun. (That's a freakin Škorpion, guys, are you trying to set the mommy blogs off?) Maybe only some of those examples were first party, but they were all approved for sale by Nintendo and I take that as consent. (Can't wait for the upcoming Switch/Beretta partnership!)

I've never been a huge fan of the peripheral trend, but that might be because I'm a huge cheapskate who guffaws whenever he sees a 50+ price tag. This tools tend to be rather expensive and their versatility rarely makes up for that cost. At the end of the day, I'd rather put by money behind a cool new game, but by that same merit, perhaps I'd enjoy said game a lot more with a piece of £20 cardboard strapped around my face. Who knows? I think it a mostly harmless practise and always find it fun to gawk at the latest item and go, "Why?"so I don't want it going away anytime soon. I'm always interested to see the ways that Nintendo try to exercise their creativity, even when a lot of them are quite dumb. You can't fly if you don't first stumble, or something like that, I'm no Ted talker. Looking at all these examples does leave me with one genuine question, though; how long until Nintendo try VR again?