 At 11.30pm on the day before the Wii U eShop closed forever, we rushed to use up the last funds we had loaded onto our family Nintendo account. There was one game on the Wii U that our 7 year old daughter needed to have that we had to get before it was too late. What was our final Wii U eShop purchase? Well, you'll have to wait a little longer into the video to find out. Sorry for the tease. First, a eulogy for the Wii U. It's safe to say that our daughter has grown up with the Wii U more than any other console. It came into our house just a few days after she was born, as a gift from my sister. My sister had wanted to get me a spectacular milestone birthday present, and she'd been pondering an iPad, but having seen the amount of joy that the Wii U has brought my daughter over the years, I think her auntie made a good choice in going with this. When our daughter was brand new, having two screens was very helpful. Kotor and I could sit playing Mario Kart while our daughter lay on me, sleeping or feeding, with Kotor looking at the TV, and me watching on my smaller personal screen. We tried desperately to keep our daughter away from screens until she was two years old, and gaming on the Wii U made this a lot easier. At this stage though, the console was little more than a glorified Mario Kart machine. We had a couple of other games, but beyond kart racing, the biggest hit for me personally was Slender, The Arrival, which I became obsessed with for a few months, and which I definitely wouldn't have wanted to put on the TV for our daughter to watch. Then, when we got a PlayStation 4 and eventually a Switch Lite, the Wii U started to gather dust. We wrote it off as a nice idea in theory, but not really all that compelling. How wrong we were. As soon as our daughter got old enough to start playing games, she fell in love with the Wii U. And now, with two Switches in the house, it remains constantly in use. Our daughter started with Mario Kart naturally, but soon branched out. It was the right time to invest in Disney Infinity, as our daughter loves Merida, and the toys to life figures were dirt cheap following the game's cancellation. We also did plenty of Lego Dimensions, which allowed Sonic the Hedgehog to go to Hogwarts. So what's not to like? The Wii U gamepad is the perfect chunky touchscreen for small hands, ours is constantly getting covered in a layer of sticky fingerprints, but it wears this well. It's certainly preferable to getting fingerprints on our Switch OLED model. We began to branch out, buying more second-hand Wii U games that had otherwise been forgotten. Nintendo Land was a huge hit with our daughter. Mario Party 10 has gone down a treat. She likes to chase everyone as a giant bowser. And then there's Splatoon, Kirby in the Rainbow paintbrush, Mario Maker, Yoshi's Woolly World. We're still tremendously proud of the review she did on the channel for Super Mario 3D World. For the most part, it was nice to hoover up these games a few years after their release, as they were nice and cheap on eBay. The one exception was Hyrule Warriors, a game that seemed cheap at first, but our daughter wanted all the DLC, and spent a lot of her pocket money on extra character packs. It still worked out cheaper than buying the Switch version, but we did get Nickel and dimed a bit by the eShop. This is how we ended up with spare credit to burn in the last days of the Wii U eShop. And fittingly, the one game that our daughter wanted was, in fact, a Zelda game. Not a Wii U game, though, a Virtual Console DS title. The Legend of Zelda Spirit Tracks. Technically, we have this game somewhere on the DS, but the cartridge isn't in its box, so functionally, it's gone forever. Playing the game on the Wii U, though, opens up the possibility to play this game together, as a family on the TV. An otherwise very private, personal gaming experience therefore becomes a social one. This is even better thanks to the game's train mechanics. Our son is two years old and obsessed with trains, so this is a game that the whole family can enjoy together now that we have it on the TV. This does raise the question, though, about when and how DS games might get another re-release in future. The Wii U does a decent job of providing the full experience, but even on this device, the dual screens are difficult to display properly. The Switch would provide an even worse DS emulation experience and certainly wouldn't work in docked mode. Certain games, Ghost Trick comes to mind, have been adapted for single screens, but this suits some games more than others. Alas, the more a game makes use of the unique DS features, the harder it is to port to other consoles. With the closure of the Wii U and 3DS eShops, it may be a long time before Nintendo provides DS games in any form. Thus, we feel justified in snapping up spirit tracks before it was gone. It'll be interesting to see just how long it takes for our daughter to move on from the Wii U. She still occasionally gets out the original Splatoon for a few rounds, even though she has Splatoon 3 on Switch. It's likely that, as she gets older, she'll have the same nostalgia for the Wii U that Kotor has for the Sega Master System, and that I have for basically any version of Street Fighter 2, or my friend's old Mega Drive, or the N64. Reports of Wii U's breaking when left in storage are worrying. Our daughter would not cope with coming back to her childhood favourite console, only to discover that it has turned into a large plastic paperweight. But then, that risk is only relevant if the console is left unattended for an extended period of time. With spirit tracks to play, plus all her regular favourite games, it's unlikely that our daughter is going to give up on the Wii U just yet. The moral of the story? Sometimes it takes the right person, in the right place, to truly appreciate something of value. Hello, Kotor the artist here, just to let you know I'm doing commissions. I've got a big camera purchase that I need to fund for my day job, so I'm hoping to raise a little extra money towards it. Over on our new coffee store, ko-fi.com forward slash video game story time, you can order either your own or someone else's face drawn in my style, or if you're feeling adventurous, I'm drawing pets and animals and other derpy things in the style that I typically use for Pokemon and Ugly Sonic. Let me know if there are any other types of commissions you'd like me to offer, and thanks very much for watching all the way to the end of this video. You are a top tier viewer, and we love you.