It’s no secret that the Wii has been inundated with crappy games ever since its launch. As Nintendo itself puts out superb, top-rate titles like Twilight Princess and SSB: Brawl, third-party developers continue to exploit the Wii’s impressive sales and simple development kit to rush a bunch of junk out the door in the hopes of making a quick buck. The only way to put a stop to this is for Nintendo to put its foot down and find a way to at least educate consumers and help them steer clear of horrid titles. Luckily, the solution is easy, as they have done it before. Now is the time for the Big N to bring back the Official Nintendo Seal of Quality.

Most of you already know what I’m referring to when I talk about the Seal, but anyone who was born after 1990 might not have the slightest idea. Basically, Nintendo adopted the Seal as a way to restore consumer confidence after the Video Game Crash of 1983. During this bleak period, the gaming market was saturated with absolute drivel, and the industry was hit so hard that it was feared that home console and PC gaming would never recover. The crash was caused not only by sub-par games, but a glut of systems as well. At the time of the crash, there were over a dozen different gaming consoles, and none of them had lockout devices or development restrictions. The resulting rush of startup companies making low quality games crippled the industry, leaving even mighty Atari a shell of its former self.

Two years after the crash, Nintendo debuted the original NES, and wary consumers wondered if they could trust yet another gaming company. The Nintendo execs came up with a brilliant solution, devising the Official Nintendo Seal of Quality to show that these particular games had been tested and approved by Nintendo, and would be free of content which parents might find offensive (Pornographic titles like Custer’s Revenge where fairly commonplace on the Atari). In addition to the Seal, Nintendo restricted publishers to releasing no more than five titles per year, thus assuring that every one of the games that were coming out would be a culmination of the developers’ best efforts.

The strategy paid off, and gaming not only rebounded from the crash, but flourished during the nearly two decades Nintendo put all approved games under the Seal. It was during these years that console gaming was revived by the NES, and games entered what could arguably be called their “golden age” during the SNES era. While it’s true that the Seal couldn’t prevent every bad game (I’m looking at you Batman Forever), it’s clear that things were much worse before the Seal took effect, and they are returning to dangerous levels of craptitude today.

The Seal was retired in 2003, with the current “Official Nintendo Seal” taking its place. The new Seal says nothing about the quality of the game it’s attached to, and merely serves to inform consumers that the product will work in an official Nintendo unit. The change was made roughly a year after the launch of the Gamecube, and most gamers would agree that it was during the ‘Cube’s lifecycle that third-party support for Nintendo’s home consoles really dropped through the floor. While the Gamecube didn’t suffer from an overabundance of software, the third-party titles which were released normally lagged far behind those coming out for The PS2 and Xbox.

The Gamecube’s troubles with quality games was significantly dampened by the fact that the console sold very poorly when compared to the other two, and too many people were busy with their Sony or Microsoft-branded console to much care for the junk that plagued the little purple box. Now however, it’s an entirely different situation, as the popularity of the Wii has only exacerbated the issue. Rather than a few developers putting out a few bad games that no one is buying anyway, scam artists are dumping tons of shovelware onto the Wii, which is being snatched up by an unsuspecting public that knows little about gaming and what a good title looks like. The time has come for someone to step in and lend a hand.