A lot of us had fun with Nintendo games as children, and those memories might bring a sense of nostalgia to the games we play today, possibly deluding our opinions about Nintendo and generating a bias towards them, either positively from our memories, or negatively because people perceive the games as childish. The gaming community has often criticized many developers and publishers over practices such as DRM, rehashing, and region lock, but Nintendo has repeatedly been performing the same actions and no one seems to mind very much.
Sony’s Entertainment Network allows users to activate and deactivate content on up to 2 systems remotely.
When it comes to DRM, gamers, especially those on the PC, are extremely passionate and vocal about their dislike for restrictions on the products they’ve purchased, whether it be console games requiring online to activate, or having to install Origin and Steam to play games on the PC, DRM has never been received positively by the overall community, but while people aren’t exactly supportive of Nintendo’s DRM, they definitely do seem to turn a blind eye to it so long as it doesn’t affect them. This is especially surprising since Nintendo’s DRM is arguably the most restrictive of any, tying all content purchased one system, making it very difficult on their user if they get another system or if their current system fails. People really need to be vocal and tell Nintendo to stop with this user-unfriendliness, it worked for Microsoft after all.
On a topic related to DRM, region locking is something that just inconveniences the player, yet it’s something Nintendo always chooses to enforce, although this isn’t as much as a problem for Nintendo franchises as they don’t really have as many regional exclusives as the Sony and Microsoft systems do, but it still occurs from time to time.
When it comes down to the games, there’s many high quality games out there that publishers loved to make profit from, so they release tons of related games over and over again for a profit, stifling creativity and stagnating the industry with, what was most recently, military first person shooters. The games aren’t necessarily bad, but its just extremely hypocritical when people criticize certain franchises for coming out with a game every year, but then praise Nintendo when they’ve been releasing 1 (or 2 depending on how you see it) games per year for just one franchise.
The top games for the 3DS and Wii respectively, Wii U games not included because its still a relatively new system.
Not only the games apply to this, their handheld systems do too. Sony had a bit of fun releasing different PSP models, but in the end, they all functioned the same, just some better than others. Nintendo on the other hand, recently announced their New 3DS, which is just a 3DS, with some exclusive games and the C-Stick, which functions as a second analog stick. It’s not like they couldn’t do it, 3D isn’t exactly a feature people use on the 3DS, if they were worried about the cost, they could’ve just cut the gimmick and put in a feature people actually really want to play games. It’s like they didn’t learn from the PSP’s control issues at all. Personally, I was pretty peeved to learn that my 3DS could be outdated and unable to play games for what is essentially, just a better 3DS.
When speaking about the actual content in games, we tread on dangerous ground because it all becomes rather opinionated. Personally, I never played much of Nintendo’s games during my childhood, so I’ve never really had an attachment to iconic characters such as Mario, Samus, or the various Pokemon. My personal opinion about Nintendo games is that they’re good, they were probably the best games in their respective genres at the time they were released. But my main problem with their games is Nintendo tends to be rather conservative, adding new features here and there, but never really changing anything drastic. You can only go so far with the same franchise before the gameplay begins to be outdated and other, more innovative franchises take the flame from Nintendo’s series. I also think they have some rather questionable design choices due to them mainly trying to appeal to a younger audience. 
The hardware on Nintendo systems is always undeniably behind Sony and Microsoft’s systems, while it does make the systems cheaper and more accessible, the weaker hardware always restricts the level design and graphical capabilities of games released on the system.
The main reason I decided to write this article was because of the release of a recent game, Hyrule Warriors. The press around this game in particular seemed rather odd to me. The game is, at its core, just another Dynasty Warriors game, a rather simple and repetitive game with a niche fanbase and usually underwhelming review scores. However, with Hyrule Warriors, the game was backed by a Nintendo franchise, and suddenly the game jumped in popularity massively, although not Pokemon or Smash levels of popularity. The game was also better critically received than the other Dynasty Warriors games, and significantly higher user scores for almost all other Dynasty Warriors games (Exceptions being certain versions of 8 and 7 that seemed to have similar user scores to Hyrule Warriors).
