I'm very excited about Nintendo's amiibos. I'm a giant toy nerd, and have been looking forward to Super Smash Bros. so Nintendo characters as toys that integrate into games is genius. At least, it would have been genius if Nintendo did it sooner, and didn't botch its first attempt.

With all due respect to my colleague John Dvorak, Nintendo isn't being creative by any means. Amiibo is yet another example of Nintendo lurching forward with innovations other companies have been handling readily for some time. Nintendo does its own things very, very well, but it hesitates and stumbles at certain new concepts, and amiibo is one of those concepts.

Activision struck gold a few years ago with Skylanders, now going into its fourth iteration with Skylanders Trap Team. It's a sales monstrosity, capturing kids' interests with cross-platform game integration and collectible toys kids can't help but want. Then there's Disney Infinity, which was a bit slower to start than Skylanders, but succeeded thanks to the use of Disney characters. Add Marvel characters with Disney Infinity Series 2.0, and you have two major toy-video game juggernauts with which Nintendo must contend.

This doesn't mean amiibo is hopeless. On the contrary, with Nintendo's own characters becoming what amounts to Super Smash Bros. as a toy line and integration with several Wii U games in the future, this could be what Nintendo needs to break into toy-based video games and give the Wii U some buzz.

Amiibo could be big, but amiibo is also very late, and only comes after another Nintendo experiment that was so ill-conceived that everyone forgot about it immediately: Pokemon Rumble U.

Hey, Remember Pokemon Rumble U?

Less than a year ago, Nintendo released a line of NFC Pokemon toys you scan into the Wii U to use with a downloadable game called Pokemon Rumble U. It was an extremely simple action RPG with extremely simple toy integration. Those toys, by the way, had blocky polygon designs of Pokemon rather than the beloved Pokemon forms we know (and that are already available as toys).

It wasn't good, and people forgot about it immediately. The game was dull, the toys were overly simple, and the combination of the two showed Nintendo's hesitance to really experiment with new ideas outside of its own borders. It was Nintendo barely dipping its toe in the pool in which Activision and Disney were happily splashing around.

Amiibo is Nintendo finally making the dive into that pool. Even though we don't know exactly how the toys will integrate with games, they certainly look much better than Pokemon Rumble U figures, and the games they'll work with are Nintendo's big titles. But Nintendo still has to prove how everything will connect.

Nintendo's amiibo could be huge. It could get Nintendo into the video game toy market, help sell the Wii U, and make the biggest first-party games coming to the system even more appealing (and convince people to spend even more money on them). They're a good idea. They just aren't Nintendo's good idea, and this isn't an example of Nintendo's creativity by a long shot. This is Nintendo playing catch-up, and it might very well succeed, but it's not the first attempt by any means.

Also, hacking amiibo to put a giant Donald Duck in a video game ... I'm pretty sure NFC doesn't work that way. At that point, you're hacking the game itself to such an extent that the figures really aren't a part of it (or the games' NFC input is so poorly sanitized that you could probably hack it with a refridgerator magnet and a marshmallow).