S.E.E.S.

For the final part of this series I want to highlight Nintendo’s transition to HD—who am I kidding? We gotta talk about dual screen gaming. It’s so simple, so intuitive, so quietly revolutionary that it’s a damn shame hardware developers (really just Nintendo) left it behind. The DS, 3DS and Wii U allowed players to manipulate a second (or bottom) screen while the action happened on the primary (or top) screen. Even if the additional screen was used just as a map, as in the case of the Wind Waker remaster, it streamlined the moment to moment experience to make everything so seamless. No longer did you have to toggle between menus. It was just there. Plus, it gave everything a tactile feel—holding the gamepad as it were a navigational aid—that was so satisfying.

There were a lot of Wii U-specific perks, too: 

• The best way to officially emulate Nintendo DS games, even if the game selection was slim.
• The ability to consult a scanned copy of the manual on the gamepad for Virtual Console games.
• The obvious and numerous game-specific perks of a second, moveable screen. There’s a reason why Kirby and the Rainbow Curse (2015) remains locked on the Wii U.

Even with all the legitimate flaws of the Wii U, it has a lot of admirable features that have really gone unsung.