If you watched my top five favorite consoles list and thought, “Man, I sure wish I knew what his SIXTH favorite console was!” then worry no more. Because now you can read a blog post about it!

What are we doing with our lives, man?

But the truth of the matter is that even while making the video— even while recording it— I felt like I was leaving a console out. A very important one in my life. One that deserves to be recognized, even if I’m not going to go make another video just for it.

I am talking, of course, about…

6.

A third Nintendo console out of six? That’s either biased or based depending on where you want to put that ‘i’. But yes, my little Brawl machine that also happened to play other games (including Gamecube ones!) has a very special place in my heart. Special enough to warrant a few paragraphs of adoration, apparently.

The Wii is the only console— or, thing, really— that I’ve ever camped out overnight to get. The day before launch, my friend and I went to our local K-Mart toting lawn chairs, blankets and snacks… while the sun was still out. The cold of a late November day in Ohio doesn’t seem so bad when the sun’s up and you’re walking around. But at 4am after sitting still for the last 11 hours? Oh, I wanted to die.

K-Mart was going to have exactly six Wiis available for launch day in our small town, and we were the fifth and sixth people to arrive. Sometime later, a seventh guy showed up, confident and convinced that one of the six there would wimp out and head home.

Joke’s on him. None of us did, so he stayed out in the cold until morning for no reason. I wonder what that guy’s doing these days.

But why were we so determined to get a Wii on the day it came out, when Christmas was right around the corner?

We wanted to play Twilight Princess. That’s the entire reason.

See, my friend and I were sort of rivals. Our favorite sports teams hated each other. Our positions in sports were always opposites. We got in an actual fist fight over Mario Party. But there was one thing we absolutely agreed on with no confrontation: Nintendo. We were Smash-obsessed, Matroid-completionist, Starfox-apologizer, Zelda-diehards. And there was no game in the world we wanted more than The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.

I know that I fawned over the Gamecube in my video over Twilight Princess being made for the console, but that version wasn’t going to release until a whole month after the Wii. And I wasn’t going to f***ing wait for that. The Wii version, with its unnecessary waggle controls, cheap Wiimote speaker sound effects and mandatory mirror mode, is the version I played first, and the one I brought home with me so exhausted and cold that I only made it about a half hour into the game before I passed out with Link just standing there in Ordon Village, waiting for me to wake up.

Though my preferred version will always be the Gamecube’s after playing that sometime later, the Wii is what gave me my favorite Zelda of all time. But that single-minded obsession my friend and I shared would soon transfer to…

…Super Smash Bros. Brawl, and the Smash Dojo website that was updated every weekday about it. We’d message each other anytime something worthwhile was announced— Sonic the f***ing Hedgehog being announced for the game even warranted a phone call just to freak out.

The night Brawl was supposed to release, I was going to school at (The) Ohio State University. And the Gamestop off campus was going to have a midnight release tournament my friends and I planned on going to. But we never went. Because it never happened. That night, central Ohio had a record 16 inches of snow fall. In March. If I thought waiting in the cold outside a K-Mart was bad, that was only a precursor to walking through a foot and a half of snow and ice without any snow gear to get my game the next morning. Just tennis shoes and jeans, baby. (Like I said, it was March.)

Funny thing, too: I was the only one living on south campus. Which was where Gamestop was closest. After getting my copy, I trudged through the snow across campus to where my friends were all warm and dry waiting for me. But it was all worth it, because we didn’t stop playing Brawl until classes started again. And really, I didn’t stop playing Brawl until my Wii broke. Fan burned out or some such. Which led me to my first experience with…

See, if you purchase a game digitally, you can just download it again later by logging into your account, right? Well back in 2009, Nintendo did not believe in this.

My Wii’s fan died (the Trauma Team’s prognosis was “too much Brawl”) so I went to a used game shop off campus to sell it for what I could and buy a new one with the credit. It all worked fine until I tried to redownload the Virtual Console games I’d purchased. I couldn’t. When I called Nintendo about it, they told me that the purchases were tied to the console, not the account. So by selling my broken Wii, I’d forfeited all my N64, SNES and NES games I’d purchased. And I, a college kid living off of ramen and Kool-Aid just to afford my second Wii, wasn’t going to accept that answer.

So I learned how to soft mod a console! The Homebrew Channel was a hack you could make through your Twilight Princess disc (see? it’s always the best) that would then allow you to install unofficial things like game WADs, USB storage and even a DVD player. My little Brawl playing machine soon became a testing ground for what Homebrew could do.

Typically, I’m not a big fan of piracy. I like supporting local shops and having the physical item when I can. But if Nintendo was going to keep me from getting the games I’d paid for, then downloading games I would have paid for seemed like a fair retaliation, right? It’s how I experienced multiple games for the first time, like Earthbound and A Link to the Past. I relived the games I was too young to play back when they were new, and suddenly, the Wii had become my gateway to an entire generation of classics. It was an overpowered SNES that could also play Beerfest on DVD.

At least, until…

When I moved across the country from Ohio to Oregon, I could only bring what fit in my car. As a result, I had to sell the majority of my game collection. Including my Wii. I sold the Homebrewed console, my controllers, peripherals, and all of my games that I’d collected for it…

…except for Metroid Prime Trilogy. I can’t really explain my reasoning. I just felt like it was too perfect to give up, even without a console to play it on. The steel case, three perfect games in one, one of the only instances where Nintendo’s obsession with motion controls felt warranted… It was the perfect trilogy. I still own that copy to this day, with its plastic casing and everything. And I don’t think I’ll ever let it go.

I could only play it again when another Metroid game released and demanded that I spend half a paycheck on a new black Wii, but… we won’t talk about that one.

I didn’t even get to games like MadWorld, Okami, Zak & Wiki, Little King’s Story or Fire Emblem Radiant Dawn. Let alone Super Mario Galaxy 1 & 2. Or Wii Sports! But what held the Wii back from getting into the video is simply… outside of those specific great games, there’s not much there. Shovelware, forced motion controls, and concepts that would be better executed elsewhere, no longer hampered by the Wii’s lack of power.

But while the Wii lacked a large swathe of classics I truly care about, the ones it did have are incredibly close to my heart. Smash Bros. Brawl was my networking tool in college; I went to every Smash tournament with a reasonable buy-in, and found friends in multiple states through the game. I made long-lasting internet friendships from my time as the forum admin for AllisBrawl, and even learned photoshop and web programming through my time there. In a way, the Wii can be thanked for OPMeat even eventually becoming a thing!

Fun fact: I was obsessed with Red vs. Blue at the time, and actually tried to organize a Brawl-based machinima as my first attempt at directing. It never actually bore fruit, because I had no idea what I was doing, but…

Who knows. Maybe I’ll go back and make it one day. For old time’s sake.