5 - An ongoing battle against online gaming

"Customer's don't want online games." - Nintendo president Satoru Iwata, 2004

"More than six million people are Xbox Live members." - Microsoft press release, 2007

While this quote from Japan Economic Foundation may sound inaccurate today, what with Nintendo's Wi-Fi Connection and all, but three years ago the company couldn't have been more anti-online. While Sega Saturn offered a modem, Nintendo never even approached the idea with the N64. A few years later, Dreamcast had a modem built in, the Xbox shipped with broadband support and PS2 rolled out its own way to take the system online. What did GameCube provide? A half-assed broadband adaptor that supported Phantasy Star Online games with zero first-party backing. If you wanted to game online, you did not play with Nintendo.

The rationale, for the time, wasn't without reason - most Japanese players got online in public places, not their homes. Even though the rest of the gaming world goes the other way, Nintendo was more concerned with its homeland than appealing to any other audience. Fair enough, but this led to Microsoft dominating the market with the attractive and easy-to-use Xbox Live.

And once Nintendo finally embraced online gaming, what did we get? Horrendous 16-digit Friend Codes that must be traded before you can play another person. Oh, and these codes aren't system specific - there are different codes for every game you buy. Who needs clever, easy to remember Gamertags when you've got a string of forgettable numbers to trade with each new title? Maybe they're safe for kids; maybe they're total pains in the ass too.

Even with the Wi-Fi Connection going strong on DS, there's still very little effort being put into Wii's online presence. When was the last time you sent a message to someone? Why do we have to wait six months before playing one damn Wii game online in the US (and when we do, it'll be Pokemon Battle Revolution )? If Nintendo had just embraced online gaming when it was in its infancy, it could be the one monopolizing the internet gamer community. As it is, that crowd belongs entirely to Microsoft, and with PS3's Home on the way, we need more than some cutesy Mii people running around to convince us of Nintendo's commitment to one of the fastest growing aspects of modern gaming.

4 - Censorship and the unshakable "kiddy" image

If you're trying to sell video games to kids in the '80s, the last thing you want to be seen as is "uncool." But for a while there it seemed like Nintendo was going out of its way to look and act like a parent desperately trying to protect his children from the outside world yet also appear hip and "with it." Initial censorship, like removing overt religious icons or scenarios from Japanese games, made sense. Scantily clad women would often receive a few extra strands of clothing, that's nothing too crazy either. But the constant badgering of third parties to remove references to Hitler or words such as "devil," "death" or "hell," had to be grating. Even more so when Nintendo's main rival, Sega, didn't seem to really mind a lot of the same content. Sega also left the precious blood in the first home port of Mortal Kombat - Nintendo saw fit to force publisher Acclaim to replace the blood with sweat.

With this one act, the thought that Nintendo was a little too family friendly came out into the open for all the playgrounds and college dorms to see. We can't rip off someone's head in the Super NES Mortal Kombat? Fine. See you at Matt's house. He has a Genesis.

Once Mortal Kombat II came to the SNES, the blood was a go, due to the verbal and sales thrashing Nintendo received. But this problem isn't about lost sales, it's about perception. After this point, it wasn't "cool" to like Nintendo anymore. All the fanatics of the '80s were ga-ga over Sonic the Hedgehog, and all the mushroom-eating plumbers in the world couldn't make the company seem as edgy as Sega. To top it all off, once the videogame violence topic hit congress, Nintendo brought its own version of MK to prove how "safe" its version was compared to Sega's uncensored Kombat. Essentially, Nintendo was tattling on Sega. If there's a better way to simultaneously look like an asshat and make the other guy appear cool as hell, we'd love to hear it.

Nintendo, once the epitome of cool, was surpassed by Sega, then by Sony and astonishingly fast by Microsoft (the Xbox went from non-issue to major player in about a month). And whenever it tried to cover this image up with the "in your face" ads of the "Play It Loud" era, kids across the country were smart enough to tell the difference between real cool and real stupid.