LogFAQs > #876487191

Sony's gaffe left the door wide open for the other two hardware manufacturers. The Xbox 360 looked pretty good but it was really selling the same kinds of things that the Xbox had. Gears of War was shockingly next gen in look and feel but it was still a guy with a gun shooting other guys with guns. It wasn't going to turn heads from people who weren't already turned by Halo. Out of options, people turned to Nintendo. The Gamecube was long since dead but Twilight Princess was sold as a return to form. Wind Waker was fine but people wanted some mature Zelda, something like Ocarina. Twilight Princess was the great Hylian hope. It was announced at E3 that it would not only come to Gamecube, but also Wii. First to Wii, actually. Oh, and $250. OH, AND BRAWL. The internet lost its collective mind when a random trailer snuck out the door in the evening hours after the press conferences. It was pure crystal hype directly into your veins. Snake, Pit, Meta Knight -- for two straight years, Super Smash Bros. Brawl drove the internet conversation. You had Zelda and Smash on one side and 599 us dollars on the other. In truth, Smash wouldn't hit until a couple of months before MGS4, but it didn't feel that way at the time. Nintendo had surged back.

But yet, neither Zelda nor Smash was a sign of what was to come. Instead, it was this silly little tech demo that got packaged with the system. Wii Sports took gaming to a new place. It was a place for grandmothers and young children. Millions of people united under the concept of simple controls and created characters called Miis. Wii Sports is really easy to throw under the bus but you won't get it from me. I had a blast playing the five dumb minigames that it came with. It was a competent multiplayer game that worked oh so well with literally anybody you could think of. It unified people all around -- except for serious-ass gamers, of course. We scoffed at it with pure disdain as we played our Zeldas and our Gears. 2006 was the time for the real gamers. 2007 is when the Wii Sports fad really took off and soared.

Coming back to Zelda for a second, that game was good. It was basically what people wanted.. until people realized that they actually wanted the magic that Ocarina brought to them, not necesarily another version of Ocarina. The Zelda fanbase united behind it hard -- that 8.8 score from Gamespot is the defining moment of its release -- but years down the line, when people were able to look at it with a little more rationality, it probably was in that 8.8 range. It just didn't do anything spectacularly new. But it was Zelda, it was on a new console and there wasn't much else to play on new consoles if you didn't like to shoot stuff.

The better game, certainly from a historical perspective, was Gears of War. The world was watching Gears and took notes. There were scores of third person cover shooters that came out in the model of Gears of War. In truth, Gears wasn't doing anything unique or fresh - RE4 had done the over-the-shoulder camera almost two years prior and it's not like we were hurting for shooters - but Gears just did it better than predecessors and it was in high definition. The weapons felt good and competitive modes were really fun. For a lot of gamers who skipped the Xbox, Gears felt like a major step.

I've written a lot and barely talked about some of 2006's huge games. Oblivion was a major force for the Xbox 360. It was a PC game through and through but this was the first time Elder Scrolls was exposed to console players. Oblivion wasn't always graceful, but it had scope and player control. It was the first WRPG for a lot of console gamers and thus had a huge impact. The Xbox 360 didn't have too many really big games at the time so this was a big get. You weren't playing this kind of thing on a PS2.
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xyzzy