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Dec 27, 2023

The Most Ridiculous Gear For The Nintendo Wii, Ranked

WII WANT GEAR This year marks 17 years since the 2006 launch of the Nintendo

WII WANT GEAR

This year marks 17 years since the 2006 launch of the Nintendo Wii, and I'm feeling nostalgic. It ushered in a new era of casual gaming, and was so successful in those first few years that stores ended up with an overwhelming amount of strange games and accessories. Check in the back of your closet, and you might even find some forgotten plastic.

Below, you'll find five pieces of ridiculous gear that didn't seem quite so cringey at the time. However, the complete list of add-ons (official or otherwise) is massive, so be sure to call out your favorite weird peripheral in the comment section.

Long before every friggin' home had Alexa and Google Assistant listening in at all times, Nintendo thought it could solve its voice chat deficiency by making a whole-room microphone that only worked in a handful of extremely limited ways. It never took off, and their most popular online games never even supported it.

Considering that Nintendo is still whiffing voice chat on the Nintendo Switch, it's worth remembering that Nintendo has never understood how people use the internet in the real world. Who's taking bets on anything less than a catastrophe on their follow-up hardware?

The balance board and the "Wii Fit" brand in general were successful, but there's a nontrivial group of young people who were very negatively impacted by this quirky gamification of fitness culture. After all, it wasn't just measuring your balance, it was tracking your weight, and then offering up flawed judgment.

Ana Diaz at Polygon dove into the shame and disordered eating influenced by this platform, and I've seen this same discourse play out in front of me with people who felt bullied by the game. If Nintendo was more thoughtful about how to display and frame the input from this plastic board, a whole lot of trauma could have been sidestepped.

The uDraw was a tablet accessory from THQ that focused in on the late-era Wii userbase. They eventually brought the accessory to other platforms, and it even got some decent reviews, but it was pretty far from a hit.

All of those unsold uDraw tablets ended up being an albatross around THQ's neck, and it helped hasten their demise. These days, their games and intellectual property have been mostly embraced by the darkness.

This isn't a real bowling ball, or even a proper digital toy. It's a hunk of plastic in which you can slide in your Wii remote to play the bowling minigame in "Wii Sports." It sucks, for sure, but it's merely an emblem of the mountain of plastic garbage that companies tried to convince people to buy for their Wiis.

The bowling ball and fake tennis rackets were third-party nightmares, but even Nintendo got in on the plastic shell game with the likes of the Wii Wheel and Wii Zapper. How many grandparents were duped into buying plastic "accessories" for their grandkids? Too damn many!

This peripheral was such a boondoggle that it never even made it to store shelves. As the name suggests, it was being designed to keep track of your vitals in real time, so that it could impact gameplay and even fit into their "Wii Fit" health branding.

Of course, getting it to work reliably on all people was challenging. The world had to come to terms with the systemic issues of pulse oximeters during the pandemic, so I'm not surprised a novelty device faced similar problems. Besides, how does one actually make using this weird finger cuff fun? Nobody could quite crack it, so it was silently killed behind the scenes.

Need some more ridiculous gear? Check out The Most Ridiculous Gear For The Nintendo Switch, Ranked.

[Image: Game Rats, Youtube]