Phil's Family Collection Friday - 6/23/17

Welcome to the second installment of Phil's Family Collection Friday! Two weeks ago we delved into my family's Wii U collection, so why not go back a generation from there with Nintendo's fifth console, the Wii?

The Wii sold extremely well and was a phenomenon. It is one of the top-selling consoles of all time (only beaten by the PlayStation 2 and Nintendo DS), Wii Sports is one of the highest selling games of all time), it graced shows like Ellen -- having the crowd go crazy when they realized everyone in the audience was getting their own Wii -- and it was just a hot commodity.

Despite arguments to this day that the Wii was nothing but a fad (even though it had a typical home console's timeline) and that only grandmas bought it to play Wii Sports (even though the attach rate of the Wii says much differently), the Wii has managed to live on and become of vital importance to the gaming industry. It brought new groups of people into gaming, motion control is still used in multiple gaming environments and platforms to this day, and the catalog is thought back of as quite nice.

The latter is, of course, what we're going to focus on. After all, this is Phil's Family Collection Friday, and not "Phil waxes nostalgic on the Wii while dropping some truth bombs." Our Wii collection is one of the biggest gaming collections in our library, encompassing 114 physical releases. Two you can't see in the following photos because I forgot they were in cardboard slips (Wii Sports and Link's Crossbow Training). Now... Let's roll that beautiful bean footage! ...I mean -- show that Wii collection of my family's!

This was a pain to prepare the photo, as I had to take down all our World of Nintendo figures! Egad! Regardless, like every other library, the Wii collection is in alphabetical order.

Pikachu, Tanooki Mario, Fox Luigi, and Captain Toad make sure no one steals our top shelf of Wii games!

We're getting close to running out of room on these shelves to add more Wii games.

Let's zoom in so you can see the game spines showing each game name! My brother and I spent a lot of time with Animal Crossing: City Folk. I remember designing a whole road system in our town, Central! The Boom Blox games were a fantastic duo of games made specifically for the Wii as well. I loved the port of Rockstar's Bully. The classes were genuinely fun with motion controls. Finally, games like Dewy's Adventure and Elebits (same developer) were pleasant surprises that would not have made it to retail in today's gaming market.

The opposite side of the first shelf! Some of my favorites are here, including ExciteBots: Trick Racing, Excite Truck, Fishing Resort, Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon, Kirby's Epic Yarn, Kirby's Return to Dream Land, Donkey Kong Country Returns, and more!

Some underrated treasures (which the Wii is full of) such as Klonoa, Kororinpa: Marble Mania, The Last Story, Mini Ninjas, The Munchables, Mushroom Men, MySims Racing, NASCAR Kart Racing (no, really!), and more.

I prefer the Wii version of Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat as I can play it without waking anyone in the house up! Then, there are some of my favorites on the Wii like New Super Mario Bros. Wii, Rayman Origins, and Pikmin 2.

Final row, assemble! This row begins with the highly underrated and awesome Red Steel 2, which kicked serious butt with its MotionPlus sword fights, much better than the original Red Steel. That trio of Resident Evil games -- RE4, my favorite version of one of my favorite games of all time, and a duo of deep rail-shooters -- is fantastic, and even the Shaun White games and Sonic games (especially Colors) are worth a look.

The Super Mario Galaxy games rank in my top ten games of all time, just like Resident Evil 4 before them. Super Smash Bros. Brawl has the content to please me, but the combat wasn't up to stuff. However, Tatsunoko vs. Capcom amazed me with how much I loved it. Forget Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite -- let's see a sequel to Tatsunoko, Capcom! Then, there are delights like the awesome Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11 that played awesomely with Wii MotionPlus, the barrel of fun, creative Wario Land: Shake It!, my favorite golf game on the system We Love Golf (which was a suitable substitution for the lack of a Mario Golf on the Wii), and various Wii series games.

This concludes the second edition of Phil's Family Collection Friday. I think next week we'll dive into the things I had to remove from the Wii shelves to get to the actual games -- our World of Nintendo collection of figures! See you next time!