I have owned a Nintendo Wii for more than a year and half. It seems to gather a lot of dust. For some reason, I just don’t play games on it very often. The odd thing is that whenever I buy a game series for the Wii that I’ve been anticipating, it seems to be the best version ever. Yet after only a week or two I often hardly ever play the new game again.

I suppose it’s the novelty of the device that regains my interest from time-to-time but repetition has, at times, become rather tiresome. I’m also having a difficult time remaining interested in new games from old series.

When I purchase Super Mario Galaxy I thought it was the best Super Mario Bros game ever. However, after digging deeper I began encountering puzzles in the gameplay that I simply did not find interesting (and sometimes frustrating). It wasn’t that I couldn’t get past them. Rather, I just wasn’t interested in working that hard at it. In the end, it’s just a game.

Super Paper Mario was one of the best games I have ever played. Unfortunately, it didn’t have any replay value.

Zelda: Twilight Princess is another game that I played frequently for a few weeks. Then, after I while I stopped playing all together. I progressed a good way through the game without a strategy guide, but after a while I got tired of spending an hour running back and forth looking for clues to open certain doors and gave in. It’s a great game and was, for myself, one of the best Zelda games ever.

Mario Kart Wii is the reason I bought a Wii more than a year before the game was released. I’ve loved the Mario Kart series from the beginning. However, I believe Nintendo crippled its replay value with the new implementation of Battle Mode, despite the addition of on-line capabilities. Suddenly, it was more difficult to get a good view the playing field and the trusty red shell no longer worked like it used to.

For a game that had a delayed release in the U.S. I expected better replay value. There are a few things that should have been changed before the release. For example, I have noticed that on frequent occasions when playing two other friends in a race via WFC the third player often gets hit with the thunder cloud. If you haven’t played, the thundercloud is one of the random items that a player can receive from an item block. It is automatically activated, which causes a thundercloud to appear over the driver that strikes one several times with lightning bolts. After several strikes eventually it unleashes a large bolt that spins out the driver and shrinks them. If you’re in third place against two other players then getting this item isn’t fun for anyone.

I also have a hard time understanding why I cannot play Battle Mode locally with another player WITHOUT the AI. The Battle Mode is, in my opinion, so bad it causes us to fall back to Mario Kart 64, which is still superior in many ways.

I’ve played (and owned) more than the games previously mentioned.

I like the Wii. It’s a great system. But what I cannot understand is why I just don’t seem to have any inclination to play it… When all is said and done I’d rather spend three hours playing a game on my X-Box 360. It’s not lazyness – there are plenty of Wii games that do not require exercising to play. The games aren’t bad – many of them are excellent.

It’s just, well, I don’t know what it is.