Phil's Family Collection Friday - 6/9/17

Welcome to a new thing on StortzumSOFT! My family buys, plays, and collects a lot of games across various systems. It made me want to start something new on this site on Fridays where I share some insights on our family's game collection each and every Friday. It's something I like to call "Phil's Family Collection Friday!"

Our first console collection being shared is a system that met a poor fate. A bit of a history lesson here for you guys and gals. Riding high on the success of the Wii, Nintendo aimed to keep itself at a high altitude with its next console, the Wii's successor. However, the Wii U didn't even start with a bang. At the E3 before its release, you know it's a bad thing when even the most hardcore of gamers couldn't tell if Nintendo was presenting a new console or an add-on to its Wii. Naming the system the "Wii U" further confused consumers, many of whom have either never heard of this system or to this day think it IS an add-on tablet to the Wii U (and an unappealing, bulky one at that).

Further complications included Nintendo not counting on how hard HD development actually was, despite having over five years of tales from developers and publishers both Western and especially Japanese having said word for word just that ad infinitum. These series of self-inflicted cuts to Nintendo and the Wii U resulted in the system flopping. Perhaps the death knell to the Wii U was after its holiday season. There were three complete months without any notable games released for the system, a momentum-killing drought (if there was any momentum in the first place) that marked the Wii U's fate, no matter how much folks like me would try to deny it. After all, we had just dropped several hundred dollars on a dud of a system with devs who laughed at putting games on it.

To put this in perspective: Nintendo sold over 100 million Wiis worldwide. They went from that to the Wii U, which might not even make it to 15 million units worldwide. It was so bad a failure that systems had to be bought back from retailers because they were just languishing on sales.

HOWEVER! The Wii U did provide a worthwhile catalog of games from both Nintendo's developers and its partners. That said, one needs a specific taste for platformers, as they were a popular choice for developers on the system.

Now, with a history lesson out of the way, let's get to my family's Wii U collection! We have 47 retail games. I won't be showing off the digital stuff, as our system's hard drive can't hold everything. Thus, that means I'd have to show what's currently on there, delete that, and then download the games that originally couldn't fit. That's lengthy process, dudes and dudettes!

Anyway, I recently sold Pokken Tournament to a fellow on a game trading site I frequent. I enjoyed that Pokemon-themed Tekken game, so why did I sell it? Due to the announcement of a deluxe edition coming to the Nintendo Switch! I definitely wanted to sell the Wii U original while I could for a worthwhile price!

Here is the first photo, the full retail/physical collection of Wii U games we have! It's a good mix of Nintendo's heavy hitters and smaller releases (though we are missing Tokyo Mirage Sessions), as well as third-party gems (some being really good to decent ports from other systems.)

Here I zoomed in on the first half so we can see the sides of the game cases more easily. You can view each game title without stressing out those eyes of yours!

Now, the right half! I really like the colorful logos on display here. It's much or enticing than the uniform lettering of games like New Super Luigi U and Splatoon on their spines.

We're so addicted to collecting that one shelf space wasn't good enough! AHH! As you might notice here, three of the Wii U games in our collection have special colored boxes to them: (from left to right) Super Mario Maker, Mario Kart 8, and New Super Luigi U.

 Let's move on from just looking at the collection to some more in-depth pictures.

These eight Wii U games are my favorites I've played of all of them. Super Mario 3D World  is an exceptionally crafted 3D Mario in the style of the Nintendo 3DS' Super Mario 3D Land that continues the series' tradition of insanely creative level design. Super Mario Maker provided me lots of joy as I absolutely LOVE making levels and maps -- always have. To be able to do so with an official Mario level creator was a blast. Super Smash Bros. for Wii U was played by my brother and I a lot, just casual fun, and when I didn't have him, I enjoyed matches with the CPU.  Mario Kart 8 is one of my favorites in the Mario Kart series with terrific tracks (one Mario Kart that has few tracks, if any, I actively dislike).

On the bottom row we start with LEGO City Undercover, without question my favorite LEGO game. Its world is so dense with things to find and collect! The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess HD didn't get as much love put into it as The Wind Waker HD before it, but quality of life adjustments and just being a more enjoyable experience made me love it after playing just once before on the Wii. Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze is a white knuckle 2D platformer, filled with challenge and amazing level designs. Many who have played it call it the best 2D platformer of all time. Finally, Yoshi's Woolly World was cute, charming, and like many platformers here, had great and creative level design.

Despite the Wii U severely lacking in third-party support compared to the competition, these particular physical Wii U third-party releases were my faves. I was devastated when Ubisoft delayed what was initially a Wii U exclusive in Rayman Legends just to port it to the PlayStation 3 and Xbox One. What was most annoying was it was because of the low sales of ZombiU, a Wii U game with an entirely different demographic to Rayman. However, finally getting to play it made it quite possibly my favorite third-party release on the Wii U. Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate was enjoyable to play both online and off. Monster Hunter hit HD and it did so early enough to get a sizable community of regular players. Launch title Batman: Arkham City - Armored Edition had cool Wii U GamePad specific features, so that made playing an already awesome game I loved even better! Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed wasn't as polished as Mario Kart, but it did show off some inventive tracks that literally transformed during the race. We enjoyed it so much on the PS3 that we just went ahead and bought it again for a cheap price on the Wii U!

Shovel Knight is a well known quality of a game by Yacht Club Games. I even got to interview the director on SuperPhillip Central! Since we love physical releases when we can get them, we jumped on the Shovel Knight disc version. Meanwhile, Runbow: Deluxe Edition is one of my favorite indie games on the Wii U period. So much frenetic fun in both single player and with friends (or in this case, my older brother). DuckTales Remastered took away some of my issues with the NES original it was based on while updating it immensely for a fantastic presentation package! Finally, we managed to score Skylanders SuperChargers for $20 at Walmart a year ago. It came complete with the game, Portal of Power, and some figures. It ended up being a really entertaining game for me to play.

Now... Let's get to a huge problem with buying lots of games -- not freaking playing them because... life! This is my current wall of shame of Wii U games I've yet to play at all. To be fair, I did play and finish the original Bayonetta that came with Bayonetta 2, but have not touched the supposedly awesome Bayonetta 2.

Well, that does it for this inaugural edition of Phil's Family Collection Friday! I hope you enjoyed looking at our games and also appreciate how much effort that took organizing the games, taking photos, writing all this up, etc. Ha-ha! If you want to see a certain game console or handheld collection that we might have, feel free to ask in the comments! Until next Friday, my family's collection goes back onto the shelf!