1. Mario Kart 8
More than half my time with the WiiU was spent on MK8. It's the best Mario Kart game by far. The tracks are almost all fantastic, with the likes of Thwomp Ruins, Shy Guy Falls, Electrodrome, Mount Wario, and this game's version of Bowser's Castle. The game is utterly ****ing gorgeous. And there's so much life and detail to the tracks that pretty much all of them could be full-fledged levels in a 3D Mario game. Water Park, Thwomp Ruins, Toad Harbour, Shy Guy Falls, and Wild Woods would all be great places to explore on foot, and they make MK8 so exciting and fun.
2. Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze
Contender for 'Best Platformer of All Time'. Retro outdid themselves after DKC Returns on the Wii. Donkey Kong games have always been more challenging than their cartoon aesthetic implies, and TF is tough but fair, the best kind of challenging. There's such a great feeling of weight to the movement, and once you get a flow going and your timing is on point the game plays like a dream. Retro also understand the importance of strong theming, too. Perhaps the best example is World 5, Juicy Jungle. The first level sees you navigating an industrial scale fruit harvest, and each subsequent level has you play through each step in the process of that fruit being processed and turned into jelly, jam, and frozen treats. Retro are telling story with the design of their levels without ever interrupting gameplay. Hell, using the story to facilitate gameplay. In Donkey Kong. This game is a masterpiece, plain and simple.
3. Call of Duty: Ghosts
Whiplash, lol
No, seriously. I wish I didn't have this here as much as you, but, honestly, when I wasn't playing MK8 I was probably playing this. I enjoy shooters, and I wanted to get at least one for the WiiU. It'd been years since I had a CoD game, and when I found out Ghosts was coming to WiiU I thought "Why not?"
Ghosts is a mixed bag. It's single-player campaign is highly derivative of other (better) CoD games, and the story is just ****ing terrible, but the foundation was solid. A rising South American super-power, USA beaten and on the defensive, an elite team of super black-ops operatives? You've got the ingredients for an engaging and different CoD experience. But good ingredients are nothing if you're trying to copy someone else's recipe and don't know how to use the stove. Is this metaphor still working? Ghosts could have had a good single-player, but they dropped the ball, and then kept dropping it, until the thing was finally over.
But the multiplayer was solid. It had a fair few good maps and the gameplay was fine. There was enough of a community on WiiU to keep matchmaking times low, and I did have a lot of fun with it. It was good to relax with, actually. Odd as it may sound, CoD always felt far more casual and laid back than Mario Kart, lmao. I guess since I'd bought Ghosts just to have a touch of variety to my WiiU library I never took it very serious, whereas Mario Kart was life. But yeah, I played a lot of Ghosts, more than I've played any other CoD, actually, which is funny considering it's universally agreed to be one of if not the worst, and I owned it on the ****ing WiiU, lmao