Considering that many Wii owners missed out on some impressive and fun titles from the previous generation, Nintendo decided to release a series of GameCube titles with the Wii's motion controls grafted on to them under the banner "New Play Control!" back in 2009 to fill a few holes in its release calendar. Classic games such as Mario Power Tennis, Pikmin, and Donkey Kong Jungle Beat were given Wii makeovers to expose them to a new audience. Unfortunately, some of the titles in the line went unreleased in North America. Now, three years later, Nintendo has decided to bring Captain Olimar back to the Wii. The neglected Pikmin 2 will arrive for Wii in North America this June according to a recent Nintendo Power article, and Polygon has an official confirmation of release along with price cut news for other Nintendo-published Wii titles. Wired's Game|Life has the cynical reasoning behind the timing of this release.

Cynics will say that Nintendo is just digging through the Wii library in order to have something, anything, on shelves for the Wii’s dying moments. It’s also building brand awareness in preparation for Pikmin 3‘s unveiling at E3 2012.

Any reason is better than none, I say. We always see Nintendo's top in-house developers shift focus to the next generation of hardware before the current generation is technically over, and considering that most everyone at the company is hard at work on Wii U titles now, there aren't any new Wii games in the pipeline that are worth pursuing. Dusting off a neglected release like Pikmin 2 at least keeps the lights on even if nobody's home. If Nintendo wants to keep the Wii train moving for these last few months, there are still a few more games that could see new life with minimal work. Chibi Robo is another of the New Play Control! titles that was not released in North America. Why not bring it out? Better yet, how about slapping the original Metroid and sequel Super Metroid into the discontinued Metroid Prime Trilogy and rebrand it as the Metroid Anniversary Collection to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the release of the original game in North America? I know that would make plenty of Samus Aran fans happy.