And by journalism, I mean 'horrible fanboy rantings that IGN are actually charging people money for.'
Think about it, that's what they pass off as paid content. Luckily, I've never actually paid for Insider, just had people pay for it for me.
IGN
AutoLockon: How Wii Wins
Nintendo's not winning the console war and the Wii itself is to blame.
by Rus McLaughlin
The Wii's a fad. The Wii is a fad. The. Wii. Is. A. FAD.
I just love saying that. I don't really think it's true - yet - but it's sure fun to watch all the Nintendaddicts spontaneously combust. This, however, is true: Nintendo isn't winning the console war. Imagine my surprise. I even called it as the winner about a year ago, but turns out we were both seriously wrong. Sure, 22 million Wiis sold in little over a year completely dusts 17 million Xbox 360s sold in two years, but in terms of dollars spent, it's equally no contest. In 2007, gamers gave $3.5 billion to Nintendo and $4.8 billion to Microsoft's game division. It's not tough to guess why.
Hiroshi Yamauchi, the Nintendo CEO who gave Shigeru Miyamoto his first shot at designing a game, had a simple philosophy... games sell consoles. He made damn sure there was a true Mario game on hand for three Nintendo console launches. When he took the GameCube to market, he as much as said he wasn't trying to go up against the PlayStation 2.
Yamauchi was taking on the PlayStation 2's huge game catalogue, and if the Cube hadn't started at such a deficit, who knows... maybe it would've stood a chance. The Wii actually reverses that approach.
That casual gaming market we're always talking about? They're not buying a Wii to play Mario or Metroid or Zelda, or even a Wii Sports, really. They're all geeked out on the way games are played on the Wii, not the games themselves, and it doesn't take much for them to get their fix. They dig swinging a Wiimote around, playing Wii Tennis, Wii Bowling, Wii Whatever. And they should, because that's fun. For a while, anyway. But they're not up-converting to more challenging games, or any other games, for that matter.
Want some numbers? Less than one in four Wii owners bought Super Mario Galaxy. Just under half bought Wii Play, and while Galaxy's monthly sales are flattening out, Wii Play's are still going up. Galaxy will not match Play's numbers even after it matures in the marketplace.
We all thought a poor attach rate would sink the Wii, but the attach isn't all that bad, really... to a point. As a publisher, Nintendo rakes in twice as much as its nearest competitor (EA) and eight times what Microsoft does alone, but Microsoft combined with an EA with a Ubisoft, a Capcom, Activision, and dozens of others, that's a different slice of cheese. The Big N's simply outgunned. If you take the top ten bestselling, non-bundled games on the Wii and compare them to the 360's top ten, Nintendo moves more games, period. Except all the heavy lifting's being done by the top four: Wii Play alone sold ten million units, Galaxy's done six so far, Mario Party 8 and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess are both around five million each. After that, it dwindles pretty fast.
Whereas the 360 has another two dozen million-plus sellers, and Xbox Live and XBLA.
You could put it down to market saturation - Xbox simply has more games on the shelves than the Wii, just like the PS2 did - but more people own Wiis. A lot more. And they're just not branching out to newer titles like people who went with the Microsoft Exploder are. My personal 360/Wii ratio is about 3 to 1. And I blame the Wii for that.
I don't care if it sounds dirty and wrong, I play with my Wii all the time, and I enjoy the hell out of it. I strongly suggested its innovative controls are the wave of the future not two weeks ago. But friend, the majority of games coming out on the platform are just not living up to the potential of that innovation. Most do their best to work around it. Some flat-out ignore it. And the Wii itself is starting to show its limitations.
The PS3 has the reputation for being tough to develop for (and a severely overpriced dev kit to back it up), but take a second to really look at who's developing really good games that actually take full advantage of what the Wiimote can do. There's Nintendo, and then there's... Nintendo. Capcom's done pretty well with Resident Evil 4 (arguably the best version of that game) and Zack and Wiki, their under-released sleeper. Compare that to Dead Rising, Lost Planet, Devil May Cry 4, and upcoming Resident Evil 5 and Bionic Commando for the 360, and you can see where Capcom's throwing its weight. For all the initial enthusiasm around opening the Wii to third party development, that's fairly representative across all the major developers. A lot of games try their best to turn the Wiimote into a NES controller. When they do create something Wiimote-centric, it's a minigame collection. Everybody's stuck on minigames. Maybe that's because minigames are what's really been successful on the Wii so far, but between you and me, the inspiration's running pretty thin already. EA's Ninja Reflex is a harmless distraction, but I get the feeling the guys at Sanzaru Games topped out at six ninja challenges before they ran out of ninja ideas.
You'd think it was tailor-made for shooters, but I can only think of three FPS Wii games on the market, two of them are World War II shooters (a genre that's thankfully gone into recession) and only one was a moderate hit.
And then there's Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. Man, would I love for this game to be good. If ever there was something to excite you about owning a Wii, it's getting to be a freakin' Jedi (or Sith, as the case may be) and bust heads with your very own lightsabre. I want to be on my feet, holding the Wiimote like a lightsabre, swinging it around to parry incoming laser fire, hacking through scores of Imperials (or Rebels, I'm not a picky guy) and dueling other Jedi, exactly as if the thing in my hand was a lit energy sword.
Except that's not gonna be the way it's gonna be, now is it? Why did Nintendo shut down lightsabre brackets for the Wiimote?
If you've ever taken a fencing class - or hammered your kid sister with cardboard wrapping paper tubes when Mom wasn't looking - you know why. Swing a sword, and it stops when you hit something, another sword, a body... but a Wiimote won't stop. Even though we interact with the game physically, there's barely any physical feedback from the game back to us. That weak rumble is never going to tell me my attack's been stopped. The Wiimote is too rudimentary to represent a virtual sword fight that's not on some pretty tight rails. I hope I'm wrong, but it's my sneaking suspicion the one-on-one lightsabre duels - and by extension, the entire game - LucasArts and Krome Studios are promoting as a Wii-exclusive feature will just be me sitting on the couch, giggling the Wiimote a few inches to the left, waggling it to the right, making a circle, No More Heroes, Part Two. It might be kinda-sorta fun, but it's well short of cool in my book.
And cool is where the Wii should live, on both fronts, casual and hardcore. If you've got your Wii and twenty Wii games on your shelf, and you think every one's a masterpiece of design and function, hey, go crazy. But you've got to know you're in the minority, even among Nintendaddicts. For my money, it's time for Nintendo to acknowledge that they need to do more than sell dev-kits; they have to work with their new partners to create thrilling new content that doesn't just adapt itself to the Wii, but actually exploits the platform's conceits. Every time they've gotten heavily involved with an outside developer - Metroid Prime 3 springs to mind - the results paid off, creatively and financially. Together with the DS, Nintendo is the house of unconventional game interfaces... it took years before developers caught up to the DS, but the Big N's got to start sharing their Wii know-how Now.
The Wiimote could use an update, too. A bigger and better rumbler in both controls might help add a sense of resistance when it's needed. Those controls, as smartly designed as they are, need to get smarter. Much as I enjoyed Prime 3, it was a big drawback that I couldn't aim directly at the baddies; I was stuck playing to the sensor bar, not the screen, which would make it the most retarded light-gun game ever. No wonder those other shooters tanked. We should be able to calibrate those controllers, zeroing them for aiming and spatial movement any time we want. That alone opens up a whole new range of things you can do with the Wiimotes. You'd get full range and depth of motion, for one thing. Forget waggling. Start thinking about how you move, and how that can translate to a video game.
Even without upgrading, developers have to start approaching the Wii like it's The Wii, and not a PS3 with inconvenient control maps. Think a first-person Street Fighter where you mime your fireballs and punches, a Warhawk where nunchuck and Wiimote become throttle and joystick, a Mr. Fantastic-type superhero who's click-and-drag stretched to attack and evade, or a platformer where you've got to constantly draw your path as you go. There are untapped applications for the Wiimote. Somebody... anybody: tap them.
As for the casual market... well, it's gonna be tough to get those people to shell out. If they wanted a lot of games, they wouldn't be casual gamers, and converting them from one to the other is having mixed results at best. You can already see Nintendo trying hard to cross Super Smash Brothers Brawl over, and while it's a good candidate, it won't work. That huge lineup of Nintendo characters that we love and demanded will intimidate and turn off most neophytes. Brawl's sweet geekology is self-defeating that way (and again, it makes the Wiimote pretend it's a classic controller). That said, I'd think Mario Kart Wii stands a better chance with its Game Boy lineage if it's positioned as a racing game first, and the fanboy-pleasing roster is grossly downplayed in the prime time commercial spots. Kart's control scheme is just as intuitive as Need for Speed's Wii port, only with a bit more functionality beyond controller tilted steering. It's accessible physically, so they just need to make it accessible psychologically to people who don't know or care who Bowser is.
What both these games have in common is adaptability. You can play them in any of four different controller configurations, and that's also an important step in the Wii's evolution. Just as developers have to start catering to the Wii, the Wii has to cater to gamers and let them play their games any damn way they want to.
Oh, there will be other factors. I'm hearing interesting things about Wii homebrew - don't those words just give you warm fuzzies all over? - and maybe we'll see something cool pop up on the Frii channel someday. I'm also interested to see how Wii Fit does, since it basically turns your game console into something other than a game console (i.e. an exercise machine). Mostly, I just want to see Nintendo follow through on all the promise they've shown with their console design. If they can, they truly do deserve to mark off this generation as a win.
Fingers crossed.
Think about it, that's what they pass off as paid content. Luckily, I've never actually paid for Insider, just had people pay for it for me.
