The Wii was first released less than a month before this strip was first run. The appeal of the Wii might not have been known at the time this strip was drawn.
You can see today’s strip at 2014/11/14 (either adjust the URL for the new date or use the Gocomics calendar function). I also noticed that The Norm comics back in October and November 2014 are the original “full-sized” images: 900×234 resolution. They aren’t blurry like the current strips are.
A lot of the early Norm 1.0 reruns had smaller images than the current rerun. The original daily strip images were generally in the 600×196 pixel size (the current run uses 900×294 pixel size generally for the daily strips). These blurred images look like 600×196 images that have been resized to fit the current 900×294 format. I don’t know why the current images weren’t created from the original art instead of the older images.
The Wii was first released less than a month before this strip was first run. The appeal of the Wii might not have been known at the time this strip was drawn.