Wii U Might Be The Best Console Ever. Here's Why.

Nintendo's Wii U, seen here with its Gamepad

Wii U is derided as a failure. 13.36 million sales as of September 2016 - Perhaps small compared to sales of Microsoft and Sony's competition, but damn, if I sold 13 million of anything I'd consider that a success.

I was late to the party for Wii U. I still played my Wii, and had a substantial library of PS3 and Xbox 360 games to get through, but in the end I caved when I could get a Mario Kart 8 and Splatoon pack. Bringing home Super Mario 3D World and New Super Mario Bros U also, I was instantly hooked. Gorgeous HD graphics, wonderful music, and of course great gameplay showed me what I'd been missing.

Sure, my PS4 performs better in general, and has a far broader range of available games, and I find the Wii U Gamepad troublesome to use (enough that I don't often pick up games that require its use), but there is a charm to the first-party Nintendo games that you can't find anywhere else.

"Best Console Ever" is quite an accolade though, so how have I come to this conclusion?

SM3DW - one of Mario's greatest adventures

Wii U natively plays Wii U and Wii game discs, using a variety of controllers. The Nintendo eShop contains games from NES, SNES, N64, Gameboy, Gameboy Advance and DS, as well as Turbo Grafx and Sega's early home consoles. The eShop also contains many great Indie games, including Shovel Knight and recently the awesome Super Meat Boy (which was initially pegged as a Wii exclusive, but never made it to that console). These games, and many Wii U games can even be played on the Gamepad's screen if someone else wants to watch TV. The Gamepad even has a Wii Remote Sensor Bar built in, so you can play classic Wii games without hogging the TV.

With an easily applied software mod to the Wii side of the operating system, the console can also be made to run emulators for all of the above consoles, and others including Playstation, with varying success depending on the title. Gamecube games are also possible, and run at full speed, with a piece of software cheekily called Nintendont.

Hori's fantastic Wii U Fight Pad comes
close to the true Gamecube controller

You can use a variety of controllers to play these - from the decent Wii U Pro controller to the Wii Classic controller and various other Classic controller versions, including an official SNES pad and soon official NES pad when the NES mini comes out next week. Original Gamecube controllers also work with the USB adapter. I use a Hori Fightpad, which is shaped as and functions as a Gamecube controller to play Gamecube games this way.

Whilst Wii U may not have the graphical power or the third party support of its 8th gen peers, it has the potential for backwards compatibility of every console back to the beginning of Nintendo, giving it a library of thousands of awesome games. Controller options are vast, and the general aesthetic of Nintendo is, of course, unadulterated fun.

So hey, Wii U, don't worry about the haters - I love you.