Wii Launch T-Shirt Countdown, Two Days To Go!
Friday / 11.17.06 / 08:10PM / Joe
To celebrate the launch of the Wii this Sunday, I am spending the week wearing a different Nintendo t-shirt each day... and presenting a new Nintendo "innovation" from the Era of the GameCube.
T-minus TWO
"You Lose," featuring an angry Goomba. I wore this on the day after the election.
Has everybody noticed that my daily Nintendo shirts have all been in different colors? Wiiiiiii! What will tomorrow bring? Only the coolest Nintendo t-shirt ever.
Today's GameCubeian innovation: the eReader. Bit of a lateral here, since the eReader is primarily a GBA innovation. But since a couple GameCube games did make use of it, and since the Game Boy Player essentially turns all GBA games into GameCube games, I'm going for it.
Although I'm pretty tired of having to explain why it was cool, since so many people hated on it immediately. Like most of Nintendo's risky moves for this generation, the best features of the eReader simply required too much gear for most gamers to consider it worth the effort. If you wanted to use it with Cube games, you needed a GBA. If you wanted to use it with compatible GBA games, you needed two GBAs. Plus the cable. And by itself, the eReader just wasn't compelling... scanning in ten data strips to play Ice Climber just wasn't worth the time investment.
Once you got the necessary equipment together, scanning items into Animal Crossing was huge. The NES-styled Pokemon games hidden on certain trading cards were amazing. Nintendo under-marketed the good points and the whole thing was buried under people bitching about having to pay $5 for a pack of cards that spliced new levels into Super Mario Bros 3. | 
