But unlike the original Wii, there's no Wii Sports to get people who would normally not even buy a console to buy in.

The Wii and Wii sports was a freakshow level of success. It tapped into a lot of things Nintendo simply is not going to be able to reproduce: aging gamers with few casual gaming outlets, the novelty of motion controls, half the cost of a xbox/ps, etc.

It really had no competitors. PS Move, while a nice technical effort, came too late and didn't have the developer support needed. The Kinect failed also for the same reasons on top of lacking a holdable controller so Kinect-games were ultimately forced to be super simple as waving and moving around can only do so much.

The Wii U had these types of games and they didn't blow up like the original Wii. I think its fair to say no one expected the Wii to take off like it did and unrealistic to expect Nintendo to follow the same formula and to get the same results. If anything, motion control games died fairly quickly as the fad ran itself out and are only coming back now as a much needed accessory for pricey VR systems.

To a much lesser degree, Brain Age did the same for the Nintendo DS. It expanded the DS market to a lot of non-traditional buyers.

Nintendogs also caused a huge jump in sales.

The wii is still really fun and quite different as gaming experience from regular consoles. I booted it up today just for fun and ended up playing mario galaxy for hours with my 5yo cheering me on. Playing my ps4 is also fun, but not as relaxing and definitely not as approachable.

To be fair, the Wii U had these — arguably better versions of all the sports — and that wasn't a large draw for that.

To me, part of the problem was that Wii Sports Club for WiiU wasn't a free pack in.

What about 1-2 Switch?

Reviews haven't been very friendly to 1-2 Switch. Seems like it should have been a freebie/pack-in or at least very cheap (say $10-20).

This to me is up there in dumb Nintendo decisions together with calling it "Wii U" and discontinuing the mini NES. Did they really think anybody would pay $50 for that? 1-2 Switch like Wii Sports was a perfect demo of the system and everybody should get it for free to entice them.

> Mario Cart

I'm imaging Mario & Co racing around in shopping carts, grabbing and tossing bananas etc..

That's about right.

totally plausible nintendo game. In a good way

Not a bad approach to continue evolving the series

We need a supermarket battle arena!

SnipperClips is a fun game, but I can't imagine anyone could say it justifies spending $300+.