You know what I love? Game critics. What an existence. You play games all day, you sit pensively for a moment afterwards, and then you single-handedly tear apart a multi-million dollar effort in a matter of seconds. Effortless destruction! They are, however, like the leukocites of the game kingdom: they’re there to make sure that the vile and offensive are killed off and handily decomposed, protecting the innocent public from ever being a victim so much game awfulness. They do serve a purpose, I guess.

But sometimes, just like an organ donation gone wrong, these fighter cells wrongfully attack the beneficial entities, relentlessly attacking them while they try to do their benevolent job.

That brings me to the still mind-boggling criticisms that Nintendo constantly endures, already a year and a half after Nintendo’s Wii continues to sell like gangbusters. Analysts, critics…you name it. It seems like everyone has some doody to sling over Nintendo’s strategies and approaches to innovative gaming. How much money do they continue to make on an hourly basis? Oh right…more money than the guy that invented water. Someone HAD to do what Nintendo is doing. It was high time something drastically different happened with gaming, and if it wasn’t Nintendo, it eventually would have been Sony or Microsoft. The fact that Nintendo has been so successful with the Wii is not only based in the fact that Nitnendo has a rabid fanbase; lest we forget the Virtual Boy of the 1990’s that tried to be innovative. Just like those parachute pants you wore in 1993, Nintendo wants you to forget that ever happened.

Spoken like a fanboy, I hear you thinking. Well, I do enjoy Nintendo wares. They can peddle them to me anytime. And why? Because they take risks. They make good stuff. They’ve consistently made me happy since the early 1980s. Why wouldn’t I like Nintendo? Well, critics can think of a *thousand reasons:

1) Nintendo is for kids.
My response to this? It’s an old, worn out line that doesn’t hold water anymore like it used to. Nintendo IS for kids. And adults. And the elderly. Harcore, softcore, nerdcore. Whatever…they cater to all tastes, and you can’t argue that anymore. You tell me the target audience, and I’ll list at least 5 games on the platform that will satiate it. That really is not a small number, considering the life of the Wii.

2) Nintendo keeps re-using the same IPs.
Yes, yes they certainly do. Let me put it this way: If you were raking in footlockers full of cash with the same old song and dance, would you listen for a second to someone telling you that you’re an idiot? Probably not. Why would Nintendo drop Mario and Link? Mario and Link have been doing their song and dance on Nintendo’s front lawn for many years, and generously buttering the bread of many happy workers in Kyoto and Redmond. Why ON EARTH would Nintendo drop their beloved like a stone? Critics that go after Nintendo over this reveal their own naivete and lack of realistic business acumen. I’m no business genius, but come on.

3) The Wii’s graphics are inferior.
Indeed they are. But Nintendo got their hold on the gaming masses many years ago with ingenious gameplay, not graphics. Nintendo has an amazing grasp of human behavior and psychology, in my opinion. They know what makes people tick. They know what’s going on inside of that slimy gray matter. They’ve proven this many times over, and I believe it started around the time they made one of the best business decisions of their existance: acquiring the license for a simple, rather ugly game born in a University computer lab in Soviet Russia called Tetris. Putting aside the astute observation Nintendo made of the inherent human need to build and knock-down, Nintendo made a wise decision to go with a game with primitive graphics. No characters, no explosions, even in an era when graphics could have done far more, they went with a game based on squares. And with this decision, Nintendo handily spanked Atari in such a brutal fashion that they were never actually able to recover. Nintendo knows what’s addicting, fun, and engaging, and it is simply not hyper-realistic graphics. Given the past track record of Nintendo, this is practically not even an opinion, it’s a fact.

4) The Wii is a platform for Shovelware.
All platforms have games that suck. I’m sorry, but they do. The Wii’s shovelware is always given the blistering spotlight simply due to the fact that the Wii is on top, and admittedly, some of the Wii’s shovelware is particularly bad that it’s almost fun to string up and publicly humiliate. That’s really all there is to that. (And, we’ll let the leukocytes keep doing their job of protecting the public from the shovelware. That’s their job.)

Just my opinions on that. Chime in and let me know what you guys think.

• Not actually a thousand.