Last year, I authored a set of three articles about where the Wii was, is, and is going 2 years since its release.  At that point, I described the Wii as an unqualified success in nearly all ways, except its game library, which was still suffering from shovelware and rehashes.  How have things fared over the last year for Wii?

Surprisingly well, actually.  The world is slowly slogging through a recession, and that has certainly put the brakes on the runaway success of Nintendo's console.  The Wii has slowed, but by no means has it stopped.  Since December of last year, Nintendo has sold another 20 million Wiis, and will certainly exceed 60 million sold during this year's Christmas season.  The Wii has outsold its competition in every month but one, September, when the Sony Playstation 3 leaped to the top on the heels of its price cut.  Otherwise, it's been all Wii all the time.

While hardcore gamers continued to lament the Wii's existence, more new gamers were brought in to the family, whether it was kids receiving their first console, adults buying into fitness gaming, or lapsed gamers getting back into the hobby of their youth (New Super Mario Bros. Wii selling over 1.6 million units in one week last week is testament to that last group).  Even hardcore gamers continued to buy Wiis as their 2nd console, so that they can play an increasing number of hardcore titles.  If there's a surprise here, it's that there's anyone left who doesn't already own one.

If there's a theme to this article other than the 2009 year in review, it's "no excuses".  Some of the biggest complaints about the Wii were addressed in 2009, strengthening the platform and eliminating the source of much whining and complaining by naysayers.  For example...

There's no excuse for waggle anymore

It could be argued that the biggest event of 2009 for the Wii was the release of the MotionPlus module, finally fulfilling the promise of one-to-one motion control to games.  FamilyWii/MotionGaming's game of the year, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10, was one of several games that featured the technology, and it certainly delivered on its promise.  The new precision of control possible with MotionPlus was also demonstrated in one of EA's other sports titles, Grand Slam Tennis, as well as Nintendo's own Wii Sports Resort.

That made games released without the benefit of the technology all the more disappointing.  No game was more disappointing on the controls front than EA's Madden NFL 10, which not only stripped out all of the tried and true motion controls that marked the first 3 games on Wii, but ignored MotionPlus altogether.  Instead, EA decided to revamp the game presentation with a look that people were decidedly conflicted over.  Really, even notorious shovelware developer DDI jumped on the MotionPlus wave with their Crazy Golf sequel.

There's no excuse to not buy WiiWare anymore

The other big event of 2009 was Nintendo's operating system upgrade to permit the use of SDHC cards for the storage of WiiWare and Virtual Console games.  No longer limited to the paltry 512 MB of internal flash storage, nor the similarly anemic 2 GB of standard SD cards (and then only as backup storage), Nintendo delivered the card management system pioneered by developer Vicarious Visions (which they invented while working on Guitar Hero: World Tour) that not only modified the operating system to permit nearly seamless access to and loading from external storage, but expanded that to the present 32 GB size limit of the SDHC storage standard.

This gave a boost to WiiWare sales, according to rumor, as gamers no longer needed to "clean out the fridge" before making on-line purchases.  And it's a good thing, as 2009 saw some of the most ambitious WiiWare releases yet.

There's no excuse for hardcore gamers to be bored

2009 was truly the year that developers and publishers took a chance on hardcore and mature games on Wii.  No other publisher took it to the mat stronger than SEGA, who brought a critically acclaimed trio of titles in the first half of the year.  The rail shooter House of the Dead: Overkill, the visually stylized brawler MadWorld, and the futuristic first person shooter The Conduit all graced our Wiis and gave us intense and high-quality experiences.  Accompanying these games early in the year included Ubisoft's Tenchu Shadow Assassins, THQ's bug brawler Deadly Creatures, and GameCock's quirky platformer Mushroom Men.

Later in the year, we were treated to one of the best games of the year (and sadly not reviewed in time to be considered for Game of the Year), Konami's Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, as well as a pair of highly regarded rail shooters, Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles and Dead Space: Extraction.  Ignition Entertainment swiped the rights to the stylish 2D fighter Muramasa: The Demon Blade, and loser in the Muramasa sweepstakes, XSEED Games, still got to deliver the highly regarded real time kingdom builder Little King's Story and the definitely-less-than-highly-regarded "haunted house simulator" Ju-On: The Grudge.

There's no excuse for new gamers to have missed out on the GameCube's best

One of Nintendo's initiatives this year was to bring some of the best GameCube games to the Wii, giving them Wii controls, and turning them loose on another generation of gamers who likely missed out on them the first time around.  While the GameCube's best 3rd party game (Resident Evil 4) already came to the Wii early in the generation, Nintendo did the same with their New Play Control line of budget games.  Top of the list there were Pikmin and our Game of the Year runner-up, Metroid Prime Trilogy, which gave us both Metroid Prime games with the NPC treatment plus Corruption, all in a stylishly integrated unified interface and packed in an equally stylish metal and resin game box.  Other games getting control overhauls, to lesser degrees of success, were Mario Tennis and Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat.  American gamers, though are still waiting to get Pikmin 2 and Chibi Robo, which should arrive in our stores in early 2010.

There's no excuse to not be able to buy a Wii

Finally, there's the matter of being able to buy a Wii.  Nintendo finally caught up with demand this year, and for the first time since launch, you could walk into a typical store and buy a Wii off the shelf without having to wait in line or camp out early in the morning.  Price cuts by the competition helped to kickstart console sales in the autumn, and Nintendo finally gave in as well, dropping the price of a Wii by $50 to $199.  In response, new gamers bought over 1 million Wiis during the Black Friday shopping weekend.

With nearly half of the console market, the Wii continues to dominate this gaming generation.  In the 2nd article, I make my predictions for 2010.  Finally, in the 3rd part, we look at the best Games of the Year for 2009.