NES: Your friends had this so you had to be competent using it if you wanted to be accepted by your peers. As a reward for your efforts you got Castlevania 3 though. In a rare moment of Nintendo being ahead of the curve in hardware, its build quality was so poor you had to wait until the PlayStation 2 launch generation or the entire lifespan of the Xbox 360 to experience something similarly miserable to own after 6 months.
SNES: Peer pressure was a lot lower here but thanks to Mario Kart and Street Fighter 2 Turbo you couldn't check out entirely. Had a bunch of JRPGs / solitary games so people who didn't have friends could think it was the greatest console of all time and people who weren't alive at the time but of a similar life result could agree with them. Hideous aesthetic choices with the device meant you got to own something that looked like it had been sent back to (and returned from) 1954 when every American smoked an uncountable number of cigarettes because doctors on TV said it was good for your health.
N64: Nintendo begins its Long March to third party mobile development, sic semper tyrannis. When you went over to someone's house and they had a Nintendo console you didn't have to be polite anymore, you could say something like, "Oh, I didn't know you had a younger sibling," and it was accurate observation instead of an insult you hurled during the last console war. Nintendo accommodated us by releasing games like Mario Party where you could lose every single minigame but still win the game as a whole and a Smash Brothers without a Fox tier.
GameCube: "What if we built a console like the SNES but pretended like the N64 controller had been a good idea?" was a question no one asked but Nintendo was happy to answer anyway. In a world where your alternatives were a the under-built PlayStation 2 or the BelAZ 75710 that was the Xbox it found an interesting niche in being the most portable console with an acceptable number of multiplayer games. Like the people left at the bar near closing, you didn't necessarily want to be around it but fate brought you together to engage in heavy petting. Has the distinction of perhaps the most extravagant input method ever found in multiplayer gaming but Pac-Man Vs. and Four Swords Adventures let you willfully ignore your bourgeois decadence.
Wii: Did you like the batting cage minigame in the Yakuza series but wondered why you had to play an actual game to get to them? Someone at Nintendo did, apparently. Having passed
Peak Nintendo the suits wisely decided to "Drill, baby, drill!" in the Arctic Nostalgia Wildlife Refuge and we got the Virtual Console which, despite being an amusing epithet for the Wii itself as a consumer product, let you pretend that you hadn't lit hundreds of dollars on fire as you
threw more money into the machine.
Wii U: Going to put as much effort into this summary as Nintendo put into the console.
Switch: TBD
