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First of all I should say that I have been almost a lifelong Nintendo fan. I was introduced to the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) at the age of 5 and have owed every console since (unless you include the Virtual Boy which I did play and enjoy, but never owned). Even though I have this history and seem to be biased, I did also own a Sega Dreamcast, Sony PlayStation 2 (PS2), and Microsoft XBOX and have enjoyed many games and many hours of fun with those systems. The problem with these other companies is their shortsightedness and failure to truly innovate, but to properly understand this trend you will need a bit of video game history.

Nintendo suffered a fall after the Super NES(SNES) back in 1995 when the original PlayStation was introduced by Sony, their formal partners on the vaporware SNES CD. Sony took what they had learned from Nintendo, as much of the original PlayStation's design borrowed heavily from the SNES from the gray casing with two horizontal control ports and controllers that followed the layout of the SNES almost exactly. Sony's sole advantage was the CD-ROM format and they marketed hard to 3rd part game publishers and marketed to the public in a way that left Nintendo in the dust for many years to come. Nintendo seemed unaffected by Sony's success however, and continued to innovate and make games as they have always done. They came up with analog control, and showed the world what a 3D game could be with Super Mario 64, then introduced force feedback with the rumble pak, and brought about 4 player support right out of the box with the Nintendo 64 (N64). Even though 3rd parties jumped ship or severely decreased support Nintendo did what they thought was best for games, they made controversial decisions (such as sticking with cartridges when everyone went to CDs and launching the Gamecube with a handle and in purple), but were looking for a way to expand the audience.

Fast forward to the Wii, again a controversial decision in even the name of the console and of course the controller. The Nintendo DS (NDS) led the way for their Revolution (a code name for the Wii while in development) and brought game design back to formula. President of Nintendo Satoru Iwata could see how games were losing touch with most people and all but the most hard core of game player had become overwhelmed with how complicated games had become. Every game had become a sequel of a sequel and each iteration upped the learning curve and added more complex

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