At the end of the last few years, Nintendo sent out a link to a page that provides information on the time you’ve spent playing the Switch. In both 2020 and 2021, this report has made me a little sad because it reminds me how much more I should be getting out of my favorite little system.
Yesterday, however, Nintendo sent out a troubling Tweet:
I mean, we all knew it was coming sometime, but it does make me worried for having bought into far more digital games on my Switch than I ever have in the past.
They also included a link to a page that gives you overall lifetime stats about playing the Wii U and the 3DS. The outcome of these stats – especially the Wii U – were far more troubling than any of my Switch reviews.
When it comes to the 3DS, this feels about right. Though it highlights the fact that I have a lot of games on that system I haven’t yet played. I even bought the system a little holder with holder for games I wanted to play a while back with the idea this would encourage me to pick up my 3DS again – though it hasn’t.
This report, though…
I’m horrified to think that I only spent 61 hours with the Wii U system over its whole lifetime – I bought it in 2015. I don’t think that’s correct – I recall spending a lot more time doing non-game things like reading what all the Miis said on the main menu and checking out things in MiiVerse when that still existed.
I’m sure that I spent more than 61 hours, but the number of games played seems about right. Looking at my library, I only have a little over 20 games for that system – many of them being virtual console games that I’ve already played on the SNES. I now also own most of these titles on the Switch Online console and the SNES Mini.
This report prompted me to pull out my old Wii U and set it up last night just to see what all was on there. I think there’s also some Wii games I moved over to the Wii U – though I need to charge a Wii controller to actually open that area and check.
I did spend a little time in the shop making sure that I had everything downloaded that I didn’t want to lose, and browsing my wishlist for any purchases I still wanted to make. That wasn’t all that much, to be honest, as the system only has something like 13 gigs of space left. Way back when, I had an external USB hard drive set up for the system thinking I’d need the space expansion.
The one thing that really kept this system from being in my blog more often was the fact that you had to jump through a million hoops to get screenshots off of it. But I do remember the year I brought it to my sister’s house for Christmas and we played Mario Kart like crazy! Good times!
Anyhow, all this message of shop retirement has actually done was made me pull out an old system I hadn’t revisited since 2018. There’s some good memories here – and a copy of Zelda Wind Waker that I’ve not played yet! I wonder if you can still pick up hard copies of any of these games…
And, it helped me feel better about my Switch usage, which has been far more active than my Wii U usage for sure!