In all honestly, it probably wasn’t worth buying a new console for one game and the promise of four or five games to come, but I don’t have buyer’s remorse yet.  Splatoon is as much manic fun as all of the prerelease hype had lead me to expect, and it’s nice to actually start one of these games early on, when I’m not too far behind the curve.

I like that it’s a shooting game that’s really not about shooting people.  Sure, it’s not a bad idea to attack an opposing player if it’s convenient, but deliberately hunting down other players is probably just going to waste time, earn you fewer points, and probably cost your team the match.

I REALLY like that the concept wasn’t shoehorned into Yet Another Nintendo Mascot game.  If this same concept had gotten mashed into “Mario and his wacky friends play paintball in the mushroom kingdom”, I wouldn’t have given it a second look.  I have no emotional attachment to those characters.

Instead we get weird squid announcers and Anemone-haired shopkeepers:

The WiiU itself is a weird beast.  It has a bunch of features that I didn’t expect – being able to turn on my TV from the game pad itself is a fantastic idea, for example – but the thing was really pushed out there to die.  I suspect I’ll get a lot more use out of it as I try to polish off my Wii backlog than I ever will with native WiiU software.