Remember the Soda Stream? They were massive in the 80s. In the days before the internet, digital TV and mobile phones, they were a technical marvel, giving their lucky owners the messianic power to turn ordinary water into sugary, fizzy drinks. The unearthly sound, which came like elephant flatulence at the touch of the Soda Stream's button, took the sheen off your halo, but I suppose that was a small price to pay for the incalculable benefit of having gassy drinks on tap.

A decade or so before, the fondue set came into fashion. Suddenly, people everywhere latched onto the mysterious Swiss concept of communally sharing melted cheese.

The Nintendo Wii is this decade's Soda Stream or fondue set. The Wii sells the dream of a happy social gathering, a fantasy party where everyone participates regardless of their age. Nintendo's advertising depicts a utopian ideal where everybody has fun bowling with their friends and family; even Auntie Edna can join in despite her dodgy hip.

Reality isn't like this. In fact, most Wii parties degenerate along the same lines. One person is far too competitive and irritates everybody else because they keep winning. Another person doesn't really want to play, and refuses to perform the grand, flailing gestures of real bowling and therefore spends the whole time sitting down.

Then someone (probably the person who's being extremely competitive) knocks a drink over and wrecks the carpet, or shatters a light bulb, or knocks a priceless vase off the mantel piece. The host of the party goes into a sulk, while quietly cursing the day they decided to buy one of these stupid consoles. It then transpires that the person who insists on bowling sitting down is scoring just as well - if not better - than those who are standing up, getting hot and wrecking the carpet. Once this truth is discovered, a heightened sense of injustice floods the room, followed by a creeping sense of gloomy defeat. Excuses are mumbled, and coats are gathered.

This is a storm Nintendo have weathered incredibly well thus far. It doesn't surprise me that the absence of more than half a dozen genuine classics for the Wii hasn't done its sales any harm. What does surprise me is that the millions of middle-aged and older non-gamers who rushed out to buy one clearly don't speak to one another. Nobody is willing to admit that they bought a Wii hoping to experience the social nirvana that is a Wii party, but instead what they experienced was embarrassing and dreadful because Uncle Arthur stepped on the cat and crippled it.

There should be an amnesty on Wii party-gone-sour tales, where everyone can gather to share their tales of woe and confess that, really, a Wii party is no fun at all.

Yet even as I type this, Nintendo are still perpetuating the myth of the Wii's social fun factor. They've roped in Ant and Dec to create a series of horrible US-style infomercials where they interview models who claim to be having a wonderful time waving their plastic wands about while pretending to play table tennis and Frisbee.

But there's hope yet. It was announced last month that sales for the Wii have slowed. The tide is changing. And it needs to change, because I want Old Nintendo back. I'm sick of New Nintendo, who cynically repackage old Gamecube games like Pikmin with poorly mapped Wiimote controls; I'm sick of the New Nintendo that cynically makes all the sequels to Animal Crossing (another Gamecube classic) exactly the bloody same.

Old Nintendo had innovative ideas. They made an FPS work on a console beautifully, years before Microsoft managed it with Halo. They made the RTS work on a console with Pikmin. There are echoes of Old Nintendo on the Wii, of course: the sheer joy of Super Mario Galaxy is one example. But Nintendo are too content to rest on their laurels, too content to regurgitate old ideas rather than forge ahead with the new.

New Nintendo would never create something as odd and left-field as Luigi's Mansion, where Mario's brother goes ghost busting. Similarly, New Nintendo lacked the balls, the vision or the impetus to make Animal Crossing on the Wii the first console MMO - a concept which could have made them a fortune.

I miss Old Nintendo's love, the love that brought us Ocarina Of Time, Goldeneye and Metroid. Most of all I miss Old Nintendo's madness, the diseased imagination that created the Virtual Boy, a 3D console that gave us headaches and which nobody brought. The Old Nintendo that stuck to cartridges for years after everybody else ditched them for discs. The Old Nintendo that made its consoles tiny, purple and with a handle so you could carry it about like a petrified handbag.

When we look back on the noughties, it'll be recognised that Nintendo dominated that decade. But for me, they dominated it for the wrong reasons. They dominated not because of their games, but because they captured the party fad zeitgeist of the ill-informed. I was expecting a new generation of classic games, and all I got was melted cheese.

Ryan writes his gaming column every week at Den Of Geek. Last week's is here.