

Pick up these Nintendo games you can only get on Wii U and 3DSĬlaim these free 3DS and Wii U games before the eShop closes With E3 2023 gone, other gaming events need to step upīefore the Wii U eShop closes, pick up the best Zelda remaster ever You only have a few weeks to play an excellent indie that’s about to be lost to time.ħ essential crafts you need to know before starting Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom So consider this something of a PSA: If you want to give it a try, get your Wii U out of storage and blow the dust off it as soon as you can. With no physical release to keep it alive, Affordable Space Adventures dies with the eShop on March 27 - a devastating blow to video game preservation. And how could it be? The entire experience hinges on an oddball tech gimmick that was a commercial failure for Nintendo. Due to the fact that it was specifically built for the Wii U, it was never ported to another system. Unfortunately, the indie gem’s unbridled creativity is ending on a bittersweet note. To this day, I haven’t had as much fun with the system as I did dialing down by decelerator to keep my ship from bursting into flames. Affordable Space Adventures both highlighted how unique and underutilized it was. Even Nintendo seemed to give up on the idea by the end of the console’s lifespan, not utilizing it at all. Most games on the platform didn’t quite know what to do with the gamepad, throwing menus or maps on it. It’s the rare game for the system that understood how a second screen could be transformative.

When it comes to Wii U games, Affordable Space Adventures is almost in a class of its own. It’s a tactile experience that really puts players in the cockpit without switching to a first-person perspective. Players have to keep track of meters like heat and electricity, fiddling with their two engines to make sure the ship runs smoothly at all times. Others are more complex, putting a unique systems management experience in the middle of a puzzle game. Some of those are simple, like controlling the ship’s scanner or deploying landing gear. By using the touch screen, players manage all of the ship’s functions while traveling around. The unique trick, though, is that the Wii U gamepad acts as the ship’s control panel. On the TV, the game plays out as a standard 2D puzzler where players have to navigate their ship around lasers, aliens, and more hazards. Naturally, that shakes out about as well as you’d expect and they’re stranded in space piloting a rickety ship. As its name implies, Affordable Space Adventures is about a galactic tourist who buys a cheap trip to the stars.
