“It never got weird enough for me.” ~Hunter S. Thompson

Earlier in the month, my RSS feed had a number of headlines about how a game called “Tomodachi Life” was coming to North America for the 3DS. I didn’t even bother to read the articles as I just assumed it was a Tomogachi game but it was strange that this particular one received its own Nintendo Direct announcement just a few days following the big Super Smash Brothers Nintendo Direct. Still, I didn’t bother to dig any deeper until I stumbled across the announcement video later that day on GiantBomb.com with an interesting headline informing me how odd it was. Upon viewing the video, It immediately shot up my personal list of must-have games of 2014 and was a guaranteed day one buy.

Why though? What about Tomodachi Life instilled such a craving in me? The answer is that it’s unabashedly WEIRD. I don’t have a full grasp on what the game is, if it even can be considered a game, but that’s part of the reason I want it so bad. It has been likened to The Sims and Animal Crossing, two series that I’m a fan of, but there seems to be a 3rd ingredient that Nintendo threw in that is hard to define. It could have just totally ripped off The Sims but it didn’t. Nintendo did what Nintendoes and made Tomodachi Life its own.

Nintendo is a great company but it’s bread and butter games are seeming a bit stale recently, no matter how wonderful they actually are. Super Mario 3D World and Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze are two incredible games but I didn’t have the craving to get them immediately upon release. I already have a preconceived notion of what those games are like so I could wait for those titles to go on sale rather than buying them day one but Tomodachi Life is this strange little duck of a game that I will download the second it is available in the Nintendo Store. It’s uniqueness is something I want to discover and experience first hand immediately.

The Art Academy games are things I’ve fooled around with when I’ve played them at a friend’s house but I’ve never once had the urge to buy an Art Academy game because of how it presents itself. It’s an instructional art game that seems to take itself rather seriously. Even the skeuomorphic wooden UI lead me to prejudge the game before I even really got to play it. Lets compare it to another Nintendo Art game, Mario Paint. I spent years playing Mario Paint and look back fondly upon my time with it but what makes Mario Paint so endearing and Art Academy not?

Mario Paint is ingeniously weird and fun. From the first screen, you are met with just a white background that just says Mario Paint and nothing else. Mario runs across the screen eventually and you click him to start the actual activities but he takes a second to appear so you are left to just messing around and clicking letters in the title and having strange things happen. Every part of Mario Paint implores you to mess around. It doesn’t take itself seriously even though you could do some pretty amazing stuff at the time in Mario Paint. Will Mario Paint make you a better artist as Art Academy promises? Not really but it makes you interested in art because it becomes a fun experience through being weirdly unique and creative about how it presents itself. If they ever release a new Mario Paint, I’ll buy it in a heartbeat.

“WarioWare” is another series that has a place in my heart. It just throws the strangest things your way completely unexplained and expects you to figure it out. It’s as weird as weird can get and it’s charming as heck because of that. There aren’t many games you can compare with “WarioWare” but let’s use “Mario Party” as an example. The “Mario Party” games are great fun with friends but let’s face it, the series is getting long in the tooth. We know the formula. Rinse and repeat. Hell, I even bought the Wii and Wii U WarioWare games, as disappointing as they are for lack of content, the day of release because I didn’t know what to expect from them other than weird WarioWare silliness which it did not disappoint in.

I doubt Nintendo can ever recapture their former glory but they should continue to not take themselves so seriously like they appears to be doing with Tomodachi Life because the more weird Nintendo humor we have in this world, the better. Indie games are weird by necessity because if you can raise someone’s eyebrow and at least make them want to try it or just see more of the game, then you succeeded at the end of the day. Nintendo needs to take a page out of this booming new market’s playbook and give their strange and unique games just as much of the spotlight as they do with their big franchises. Be weird and proud, Nintendo.

Just for fun, here is a list of some of the strangest Nintendo games that I love.