Borderlands, Bulletstorm, Infamous, Little Big Planet, 3d Dot Game Heroes, Demons' Souls, Mass Effect, Assassin's Creed.

No, I'm pretty sure I have Nintendo pegged with their stupid assed proprietary disks. Yep, the Wii U will have a proprietary one too.

The DS could do it too, supposedly, I've never seen anyone actually hook one up this way though.

Oh wow, Motion Control Plus, sorry, you'd bash a MS game for just bringing motion controls to the table and nothing else (or at least I hope you would) and Nintendo doesn't get a pass here either. Look man I was tired of playing the Ocarina of Time over and over again long ago and apparently Skyward Sword manages to drop some of the good features of that. Whatever, I haven't played it, just saying all the Zelda worship might be a tad fanboyish, Wind Waker was the only creative Zelda in awhile and a lot of fans hated it (which should say something about Zelda fans... or me... or both).

Figure out what your price will be for a Wii U out the door, with all the extra shit Nintendo manages to tack on as semi necessary but not part of the base price. Then figure there'll be more balance boards, gimicky steering wheels, and whatever the hell (don't they have an actual Wii Fit exercise bike now? wtf?!). It'll be a mint. And they're trying to charge that with a console that isn't going to really outclass our existing XBox 360s and PS3s by much.

Yes, who else would you blame for this? They don't treat 3rd party devs well, they charge them more (reportedly), and clearly there's a way to court quality 3rd party titles. They even do it for DS. But as for N64 and Wii they couldn't be arsed to do that I guess (the Gamecube actually had some pretty decent 3rd party stuff, though they were multiplatform releases a lot of the time). They show little interest in trying to get 3rd party developers on board. EA is making games for Windows Phone 7, it's not like developers can't be made to be interested in even rather odd platforms.
They were never all that cheap when you considered all the really pricey peripherals you tended to need to buy. The plastic Wii-mote mounts pretty much sum this up, but think really expensive memory cards and controllers from before. RAM expansions, you name it. Charging stations for your Wii Motes... You can bet whatever the price is that you'll spend 50% of it again within the first 2 months just on "stuff" (not counting games). All their proprietary bullshit, such as the not-quite-a-dvd-drive in the Wii, is also pretty expensive to warranty. I paid $75 to have one Wii dvd drive fixed. That was with the warranty.

Hang on... what? Nintendo didn't make the golf club and tennis racquet wiimote holders and all that other bollocks, that was completely unofficial. Wiimote charging stations? Nintendo didn't make any of those either.
I'm not sure how the Wii discs being proprietary matters, just because your 360 games come on DVDs doesn't mean they magically work in anything with a DVD drive.

You paid $75 to who exactly? Nintendo have always fixed my stuff that's within warranty for free, and quite a few things out of warranty for free as well.
In fact they've never charged me for fixing anything.

If Nintendo no longer sells a product, they require you to pay them half the value of the current generation comparable product to repair a previous generation product. So if my GBA Micro breaks, I have to pay them...uh...half the price of a Nintendo DSi, I guess, since they're still making those, if I want to get it fixed.

Apparently Orcish owned a prior version of the Wii. I heard someone mentioning there have been several.

This must be a Nintendo of America thing... Nintendo fixed my out of warranty and seriously beaten up looking original DS ages after it had been discontinued in favour of the DS lite.

EDIT: For free.

The DVD drive on my Wii went out, it was $75 plus shipping one way to get it to them and fixed. Dunno what to tell you, it most certainly wasn't free. XBox 360 RROD, now that was free and easy. Wii problems, not so much.

The gold club and tennis racket holders may not have been Nintendo but the steering wheel certainly was, they have no problems with the idea at all.

The non-standard media is actually a problem, or will be, a few years hence when we're scraping together ways to make our old games work. It's not exactly easy to find a lot of NES stuff and actually harder to find SNES. Backing up or dumping our games into an emulator will become a problem.

Additionally, the proprietary media actually hurts game devs as they have to pay for specialized pressing for their games.

It really irks me how people whine about Zelda's lack of change, then whine when a Zelda game actually does something different (see Wind Waker). Such is the case with Skyward Sword. Yes, it features a fair few departures from Zelda norms, and as a result doesn't always succeed at everything that the previous games did. But it's still a damn fine adventure. That said, the sheer number of Zelda games out there have all but hammered the core Zelda formula to death, and I can understand why some people might be tired of it. Personally, I've really seriously played Link to the Past, Twilight Princess, and Skyward Sword (although I've either played or seen played many of the others), so I'm still getting enjoyment out of the series.

Fair enough, I didn't disbelieve you. I'm quite surprised that Nintendo UK offered better service than Nintendo of America though.

True, although it did come with Mario Kart (I don't think the game and wheel cost more than any other game, don't quote me on that though). It was hardly implied to be required though, I'm pretty sure the adverts showed 4 people playing, one with the wheel, one with just a Wiimote, one with a nunchuck and one with a GameCube controller.

This isn't that much of a concern, because as with the NES and SNES games, there are backups of all the Wii games on the internet. We're in no danger of losing these games.
I'm pretty sure there are methods of backing up Wii games using a PC DVD-ROM drive anyway. The discs aren't that much unlike DVDs, they just don't adhere fully to the DVD standard and aren't certified as such (presumably because Nintendo doesn't want to pay the licence fee associated with that).

I agree with you here.

My cheapo DVD drive can dump gamecube discs with a special utility (takes about an hour though). I imagine Wii discs would be much easier. Dumping discs from hacked consoles is another possibility.

Yeah, I was pretty sure it was one of the methods.
Dumping them from hacked consoles is in fact the normal way of doing it, but it doesn't address orcishgamer's concerns about the proprietary drive.

He could do what I did though, hack the wii, dump all your games onto a USB HDD while the drive is good, play the games off that and save the wear on the drive.

It will also improve the load times. Greatly. Some titles do not work with it, though. So far only House of the Dead 3 on HoTD returns and Metroid Prime Trilogy refuse to work on USBloaders for me.

... And Mario Galaxy's first and last levels. It freezes at certain points, but ALL THE OTHER LEVELS work flawlessly for some reason.

Wii U is a horrible idea. Thats all I'm gonna say.

They abandoned gamers for their girlfriends and mothers, and now they expect gimped tablet controllers will bring them back. These controllers are going to be $100+ each. I expect Mario Galaxy on Xbox Live by 2014.

No... there's only one controller per console because it's part of the console. You don't buy extra tablet controllers. If you bothered to do any research you'd know that.

Nice try, but you failed.