Splatoon and the last day of Wii U online

I’ve enjoyed my time with the Wii U. Most of its best games have since migrated to the Switch, although often with cuts made to fit the single screen. Playing Assassin’s Creed III with a detailed map available at a glance was revolutionary; Kirby & the Rainbow Paintbrush felt very natural to control. Nintendo Land remains a go-to party game to this day, with the asymmetric multiplayer of Mario Chase and Animal Crossing Sweet Day causing heart palpitations like nothing else. Its compatibility with Wii games concretes its position as an essential part of my gaming setup.

One of the more radical games on the Wii U was Splatoon. As you will have seen from previous posts, I quite like first person shooters, but I’m not very good at them. Particularly online – I have neither the speed nor accuracy needed to grace even the top half of a final leaderboard. I still play them, but they can be a dispiriting experience.

Not so with Splatoon. It’s not first-person, for a start, and the objective is not to kill other players, but rather to cover the floor with your particular paint colour. You can target others – and if you splat them they do explode in your paint colour, causing a satisfying area of coverage – but you can also spend the time covering up the other team’s painting efforts and undoing their hard work. There are various weapons, ranging from large paintbrushes and rollers to sniper paint rifles, and you form a random team of four each game. This means that different people can play it in different ways, and everyone contributes to the game in the way they feel best able to.

I favour the paint roller, which lets me cover large areas but does leave me exposed to people coming in with paint guns – so I try to avoid confrontation where possible.

I haven’t played the game as much as some, who have sunk hundreds of hours into it, but I have played both the offline and online games a fair bit. I’m up to level 16 now, playing almost exclusively on the unranked mode (I never progressed past C+ in ranked). And 16 is where I will stay.

Last night saw the closure of the Nintendo Network for the Wii U and 3DS. All online games on those consoles no longer function – the errors vary, but errors there be. To mark this I spent an hour playing Splatoon for the last time, and the lobbies were full of others doing the same. I played eight or nine games in total, and I was reminded almost immediately of how the use of the gamepad to allow you to jump around the map led to a fluency that’s missing from Splatoon 2 and 3 on the Switch – being able to jump to help a teammate without having to switch view is amazing.

I think I won the majority of games, but I suspect that’s because many people were online not to compete but to commemorate.

I spent most of my time on Splatoon, but did also visit Mario Kart 8 (I finish with an online score of around 2800), Wii Sports Club, and Super Mario Maker’s 100 Mario mode. I’ve downloaded a bunch of courses for future use on Mario Maker as well.

There is a replacement network being launched called Pretendo, and at some point I will try to configure that – but it’ll require a mod for my Wii and 3DS and I’ve not got around to that yet. I think it’ll also mean a reset to my progress on a number of games, which I’m loathe to do.

Farewell, Nintendo Network. It’s been fun.