Salt and Pepper Are Too Spicy for Nintendo; Why Are Consoles Losing Flavour?

My generation grew up with the television aesthetic of the Wii’s user interface played on huge CRT TVs that clicked and buzzed when turned on. The soundtrack to our afternoons after school included the DSi’s Shop Theme that you could not help but dance to and hum along with, the ambient ripples of sound that played when you opened up your 3DS, and the little jingles that played as you hovered over the games in your library, the customizability of the home screen to match your favourite games — I was beyond eager to see how the flavour of consoles would develop and grow with me into adulthood. I recall sitting and staring at the dynamic backgrounds of the PS3 as a kid and being 18 during the pandemic, letting the ambient notes of the PS4 home screen play in the background as I figured out whether I wanted to finish Yakuza 0 or replay Shadow of the Colossus.

When the Switch was initially announced in late 2016, my brain was spinning with ideas of what the new Streetpass was going to look like — if we would get more home screen customization since the Wii U regrettably didn’t have any themes [1]. I had hoped we would have Miiverse back or something similar (I had so many drawings and posts about Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker on there that I never was able to recover), or a return of the Arcade Bunny from the Nintendo Badge Arcade, or the ability to send my cousin stupid drawings on Swapnote, or even dumber messages on Pictochat— can you tell how much I adored my DSi and 3DS?

Fig. 1 — A horrific Swapnote drawing I sent to my cousin in 2018.

After my iron-deficient 16-year-old self saved up for my first Switch in 2019, I was struck by the bleak realization of how far we have allowed the cult of minimalism to suck the salt and spice out of life.

No themes? No home menu music? No eShop music? The music and ambiance were Nintendo’s staples! I thought to myself that surely they would release an update eventually to do something about this — I could not have been more wrong. The only customization Nintendo granted you was which coloured joy-cons you could spend a week’s pay on.

Sure, the clicks and chimes that respond when you attach the joy-cons to the Switch or when you unlock the console are satisfying, but is that really all the effort they could spare for personality?

When I recently caved and bought a Switch 2, after all the trash I talked about it in one of my previous articles, I foolishly hoped once again that Nintendo would remember that colours are cool and people missed the nostalgic Frutiger Aero sound effects of the previous consoles. They did not remember. At least we have Wind Waker again, I guess. You still have the choice of Discord Mod Dark Mode or the incorrect second option (Light Theme), and maybe that is considered generous in the age of dying customizability, though Sony seems to still honour joy and fun by still offering various themed wallpapers and futuristic home menu sounds [2]. The Switch 2's game icons have rounded edges now instead of sharp ones that the Switch 1 had, so that’s… something. We don’t even have colourful joy-cons anymore; the rings under the joysticks have some colour and that is all Nintendo could offer. I will say that GameShare is quite the welcome addition — it brings me back to the DS “download play” times.

It’s just a bummer. It’s more than a bummer, but the English language hasn’t developed far enough to grant me the vocabulary to describe how I feel about the death of whimsy in consoles and in everything, actually. McDonald’s looks like a dentist’s office now and no one knows who The Noid is. They euthanized the Petco cat and dog. Taco Bell genuinely just looks disgusting now because some freak decided a charcoal gray exterior made sense with a warm orange and brown interior; I miss the magenta neon lights that wrapped around the roof with the yellow scribble on the inside. You’d think that the more people complained about the way logos and building designs have been lobotomized, the less we would see it spread — wrong. You’ve been lobotomized. Everyone has had their prefrontal cortexes fondled and pierced. Now I understand why old people are so angry all the time. Maybe I romanticize my past too much, maybe I’m overly committed to my marriage to nostalgia, but isn’t that just what nostalgia does to you? All I know how to write about is the past and the little glimmers of light that pierce through the stormy acid rain clouds of my reality, and those glimmers typically tend to have happened about a decade ago or more.

Maybe I complain endlessly about the way Nintendo and other gaming companies are handling their products because I just want to feel like I’m four years old again, the four year old who had just played Mario 64 for the first time, tossing penguins off the cliff and giving the controller to my tío when Boos were around because I was afraid of ghosts. I want to relive life as that middle schooler who obsessively replayed the water levels in Super Mario Galaxy and joked about reading “U R MR GAY” from the sparkles in the title screen — which they did preserve in the All Stars release of the game, surprisingly. I want to go back to the metaphorical digital womb I’ve created, holding all the warmth and innocence I had before I became truly conscious. A company can’t give me that. Nothing can give me that. Video games and art and music have always been my escape for as long as I can remember, but the dopamine doesn’t hit the way it used to, and it never will — discovering the Persona series in 2023 got me pretty close to that feeling, though.

Fig. 2 — The face of the child who took great pleasure in harassing cuccos in The Legend of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass (photo taken on my DSi, circa 2009).

Consoles are losing their flavour, that is for certain. Ownership of purchased games is a concept that no longer exists [3]. Physical media is a pillar of gaming facing rapid decay.

Modernization does not equate to the colonization of minimalism over creativity. I complain because I know this does not need to be the case, yet it is something that continues to worsen as time passes. Our prefrontal cortexes have the ability to grow over the gaping hole that was made there, but the world aches and itches for more millennial gray. Adulthood is beige and soggy and rotten, why make our forms of escapism match that? Vape pens have more creative design to them than modern console home screens. Should I pick up a smoking habit to regain my childlike wonder and desire to see the next sunrise?

I hope I live long enough to dance on the grave of minimalism and modernity.

Fig. 3 — Most of my handheld consoles collected over the course of almost two decades — three 3DSs, one 2DS, one DSi, and a WiiMote just because.

I send my deepest thanks and well wishes to those who built the Pretendo network, to the creators behind Netpass, and to everyone who has put effort toward preserving the whimsy of the 2000s and 2010s.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to play Twilight Princess for the first time on the Wii I won in an online auction.

References

[1] No Wii U Themes (I hate the idea of using Reddit as a source, but I don’t have a physical Wii U anymore to take a picture of and prove my point) [2] PS5 Home Screen Sounds (I ended up listening to this for pretty much the entire duration of writing this article) [3] How the New Switch 2 Release Pulled Me Back into the World of Retro Consoles (Wow, I wonder who wrote this?!)