Wii Went Back: The Wii Month Wrap-Up

A whole month of Nintendo Wii games on the Steam Deck and it delivered almost everything I was hoping for. I sold my original Nintendo Wii years ago and the regret followed me like a bad smell ever since. Nothing has really come close to replicating that very specific kind of fun it managed to deliver. So during May, I stopped chasing it and went back properly. Armed with my trusty Steam Deck OLED and the Dolphin emulator, I was ready to roll. Coming along for the ride was a USB sensor bar, a Wiimote and nunchuck, the Wii Zapper and a couple of revolver attachments I managed to find on CeX that were coated in what I can only describe as years of accumulated regret. They cleaned up fine. Did I make it through everything I had planned? Oh dear god, no. Will Wii’re Going Back continue throughout the year? You bet your ass. What I did manage to get through this month reminded me exactly why I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since I hocked my Wii. Somewhere along the way, I realised that I didn’t need to chase it anymore. The Steam Deck does the job just as well and arguably, even better. I’ll get to that.

Nintendo Wii Setup

If you want a full rundown on how to pull this setup off yourself, I put together a complete guide at the start of the month that covers everything you’ll need. The short version is EmuDeck handles the emulation setup, with ES-DE as the frontend launcher. I used a USB sensor bar mounted under the TV, while my JSAUX dock kept everything connected and created a console-like experience. Pairing a Wiimote and nunchuck as a real Wiimote in Dolphin ensures it feels like the real deal. For the rail shooters, I swapped between the House of the Dead: Overkill revolver and the Wild West Shootout revolver attachments which makes a big difference to the overall experience. What caught me off guard was how seamless this whole setup held together across an entire month of use. Yeah, there’s a few minor differences when it comes to launching games, but once a game was running it was virtually indistinguishable from the original hardware. Combined with the Steam Link hardware for when I wanted to change rooms, I found this to be an even better experience than the original Wii. No dropped connections, no messing about mid-session and nothing that pulled me out of the experience. The Steam Deck actually does an incredibly convincing impression of a Nintendo Wii and emulation has reached a point where the differences are difficult to notice. It’s simple to setup, simple to use and feels more authentic than it probably should.

Wii’re Going Back Games

I covered a pretty wide range, with probably too much time spent on rail shooters, honestly that variety ended up being one of the best parts of the whole month. Rail shooters, action brawlers, first person shooters, interactive sports and one platformer which turned out to be one of the greatest games of all-time. The House of the Dead: Overkill kicked things off exactly how you’d expect. Loud, trashy and completely self-aware. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed delivered a undeniably great Star Wars story wrapped in motion controls that made swinging a lightsaber around feel every bit as ridiculous and satisfying as it sounds. Call of Duty on a Nintendo console sounds like a bit of a joke until you actually try it and Black Ops with a Wii Zapper turned out to be a surprisingly unreal experience. MadWorld was the most violent game on the console and they somehow managed to pull it off in black and white with Greg Proops screaming profanity over the top of it all. Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles managed to cram a greatest hits tour through the series into an on-rails shooter and manages to pull it off incredibly well. Ghost Squad was short enough to finish during nap time, but it was fun while it lasted. Wii Sports was a feature throughout the month and it never lost what made it great. And finally, Super Mario Galaxy managed to genuinely stop me in my tracks. I missed this one for nearly twenty years and it turned out to be a flat out masterpiece.

The Nintendo Wii Tax

The Nintendo Wii tax is a real thing. Spending a month flicking through the Wii library only made that clearer. The Wii was primarily marketed as a family console, that’s clear by the advertising alone and it worked well commercially with Nintendo selling over 100 million consoles worldwide. But, it came at a cost. A large chunk of the gaming community decided the Wii wasn’t for them before giving it a proper chance and unfortunately that reputation stuck to everything on the platform. Call of Duty on the Wii sold a combined total across every release that some individual titles on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 cleared on their own. MadWorld, one of the most confident and creative action games of its generation ended up buried. Super Mario Galaxy sits comfortably among the greatest video games ever made, yet it spent years getting written off because it launched on a console that had a reputation for Wii Fit and shovelware. That’s the Wii Tax. It’s not about games being bad, because they weren’t. It’s about the platform that carried this perception that made it easy to dismiss everything on it regardless of quality. The uncomfortable truth is, that pattern hasn’t gone anywhere. The Nintendo Switch copped its own version and the Switch 2 is clearly falling under that same banner. I’m not here to wave a Nintendo flag around and pretend they can do no wrong, because I’m genuinely not that guy. But I can recognise when something is legitimately good and I won’t pretend otherwise just because it doesn’t fit a certain idea of what serious gaming is supposed to look like. Honestly, the people writing these consoles off are simply the ones missing out.

Nintendo Wii Motion Controls

Obviously motion controls were a running theme throughout this month and for good reason. They were either the feature that made a game feel unique or the thing that elevated an already good game into something you simply can’t replicate on another platform. Some of the games I covered exist on other platforms. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed you can play on basically anything. Call of Duty is on all major consoles and PC. But playing Black Ops with a Wii Zapper pointed at the screen and working through that entire campaign with motion controls was a completely different experience to any version I’d played before. Honestly, it was incredible in a way I wasn’t fully prepared for. The Wiimote often gets unfairly written off as a gimmick and I understand the argument, I do. But there’s a layer of physical interactivity here that a traditional controller simply can’t replicate. When it clicks, it absolutely elevates the experience. Playing these games how they were designed to be played with the original hardware (or close to) connected through Dolphin on the Steam Deck is a legitimately unreal experience. It’s also far less expensive to put together than you might think. A Wiimote, nunchuck, USB sensor bar and EmuDeck will get you most of the way there. Accessories are easy to find secondhand for next to nothing. If you grew up with a Wii or want to give the Wii library a shot the way it was meant to be played, it’s absolutely worth your time.

Wii’re Going Back Final Game Rankings

These are the final rankings for Wii’re Going Back. Not everything got a full review, but leaving any of them unranked kinda felt wrong after the time I spent with them. Wii Sports and Call of Duty: Black Ops both ended up spawning full retrospectives, Black Ops in particular sent me down a rabbit hole that had me look at all of the Call of Duty games on the console. I think they more than earned their number and I wasn’t about to close out the month without giving them a proper ranking. A score is a score, regardless of the format it came from.

1. Super Mario Galaxy: 10/10 – Worth The Wait
   
2. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed: 9/10 – Use The Force
   
3. Call of Duty: Black Ops: 9/10 – Still Surprisingly Sharp
   
4. Wii Sports: 8.5/10 – Still A Banger
   
5. The House of the Dead: Overkill: 8/10 Highly Recommended, Motherfucker
   
6. MadWorld: 7.5/10 – Callously Carved Cadavers!
   
7. Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles: 7/10 – Umbrella’s Finest Chronicles
   
8. Ghost Squad: 6/10 – Ghosted Too Soon

Wii Definitely Went Back

If I learned anything from Boomer Shooter December, it’s that a themed gaming month never goes exactly to plan and May was no exception. Time did what it always does and a few games I genuinely wanted to cover ended up cut. Resident Evil 4 was the one that stung the most. It was firmly on the list and I fully intended to make it happen but between the rest of the month and life doing its thing, I just didn’t get there. The Zelda and Metroid games didn’t survive the cuts either and both series will stay firmly in the backlog. I’ve never been a big Zelda or Metroid guy, so this isn’t on the scale of Resident Evil 4. A couple of lost days didn’t help things either. My sensor bar took an unfortunate spill, the infared board snapped and I had to wait for a replacement. It happens. What did make it through was a legitimately unreal range of games that covered a decent amount of what made the Wii such a unique console in the first place. There were rail shooters, action brawlers, interactive sports and first person shooters that had literally no business being as good as they were on this hardware. Not to mention, a platformer that is clearly one of the greatest video games ever made. The Wii Tax is real, motion controls are criminally underrated and the Steam Deck is a fantastic way to revisit all of it. None of the cuts are permanent and I don’t think I’m quite done with Wii’re Going Back as a series just yet. There’s too much left on the table to walk away from it now.