Why should I be selfless and mature as opposed to casual players? Why should I make the sacrifice and not them? Just like in anything in the world, the individual wants the rewards for themselves -not for others at their own expense. Casual players are fine with me as a coexisting entity, but the wii library has shown an exclusions of epic, heavily story based games and titles deep custimization and gameplay options when compared to HD systems.

Little Big Planet is actually a pretty poor example to demonstrate because it was so incredibly well receieved by the same gaming press, and it actually maintains a lot of archacic game design choices the old school "hardcore" people like such as restarting the entire level because you run out of lives or having to unlock everything to actuallly get the most of the editing tools.

This Amazon Customer called it a tedious hardcore game pretending to be a casual one, and specfically complains about how hard it is to beat. So it's no wonder it was well receieved by the gaming media, it's a game about applying traditional skills to levels that may of came from thinking and creativity.

Blast Works on the Wii has a similar set-up, where you can use the game's editor to create pretty much anything and upload them to web for other people to download and play, and it's a hard as hell traditional shoot em as well. So it wound up with pretty good reviews actually.

Endless Ocean has traditional goals, but no real obstacles stopping you or wasting you time. Got reviewed less well. Wii Music lets you make your own goals, got lambasted for it, called pointless.

A carrot on a stick that's a pain to get to seems to help a lot of tradiontal gamers feel what they're doing is vindicated. Why else would achievements and trophies be so popular.

Sorry to nitpick. Good read otherwise, just wanted to point out the gaming media took Little Big Planet as one of their own.

To me games ARE important. Don't assume that just because they are unimportant to you that holds true for everyone else. You may find games shallow, but I find them on par with literature and cinema as a source of self actualization and personal growth. However in contrast to cinema and books video games are my preferred choice for achieving that. The Wii, with it's focus on simplicity, 5 minute pick and play fun has all but eliminated games for it's system that may wish to offer players a more fulfilling experience. Simple fun is good, but the Wii has shown an exclusion of depth. Cartoons are great, but if TV was nothing more than cartoons there would be a problem there.

First, I have a Wii and a 360. They're both great. However, I think Nintendo could be walking a fine line in the near future. Also, to marginalize games with high production values does not elevate the art.

It is self serving and just plain dumb to say that the soul metric to judge the quality of Wii games is how well they sell. This is the logical equivalent of stating that the best beef dish is a Mcdonald's hamburger.

The thing I fear about lower quality titles on the Wii, and I have played a few, is that they may lead to a slippery slope for the entire industry. The Wii could become the Atari 2600 of this generation (think E.T.) -- mountains of shovelware and disenfranchised gamers of all types.

You said this: 

You are insinuating that the hardcore players are afraid of the Wii because it will undermine the skills they have earned over a long time.

I say that there is far too few games on the Wii that are of the same style as the games on the platforms of previous generations and also the PS360, for these players to recognize the Wii as a viable gaming solution on par with the platforms I mentioned.

Mind you, I am not dissing the Wii or those who own it as their primary gaming source in any way. In my original post, I was merely coming to my own conclusion of why the Wii has been continuesly shunned by a majority of hardcore gamers. It is all about the image of the console. And the games on the console are a huge part of that. Hell, if all the carnival games released on the Wii had blood and guts all over them, or if there was a great GTA title on it, or if the games targeted towards the hardcore gamers were on the Wii, guess who would be all over it? The hardcore gamers. But these games are on the PS360, and only recently have they started to move onto the Wii.

EDIT: And about the image of the Wii. E3 2008, need I say more?

Okay, that is just stupid. You know what the Wii isn't either? A medicament. It is just an analogy.

It is not MY PARTY. But if you owned a console in the last generation, you owned a console that had plenty of games to offer for the hardcore gamers. That was how the "party" was, the only move towards a broader audience came with games like Singstar. Then the Wii comes along and opens up the party to a lot more people, people who previosly had no interest in joining the party.

See where my analogy is going?

I own a Wii and an XBox 360 and I see things a little differently ...

For a very long time the single minded quest to elevate the narrow definition of "Games as Art" has marginalized more and more gamers; and when Sony and Microsoft decided to play a game of brinksmanship to capture the 20% of gamers who care about this quest, the 75% of existing gamers (and large untapped group of potential gamers) were left for Nintendo.

The sad thing is that the industry has decided that people who enjoy puzzle games like Tetris, want 2D versions of Mario and Sonic games, people who enjoyed old-school adventure games, or people who want to have fun with their real life friends were not worth targeting; this is made worse because there are so many so-called "Hard-Core" gamers (who grew up playing Tetris, 2D Sonic and Mario games, enjoyed old-school adventure games, and loved playing games with their real-life friends) who argue that abandoning these gamers (and games) is the only way to move the industry forward.

You sure do rant a lot, for a person who is not angry.

Really, what is your problem with people disliking your console of choice? For those reviewers, guess which is their target audience? People who bought wii because oprah said they will lose weight with it , little girls playing nintendogz or those "hardcore" gamers?

If you do think that their target audience is any of the first two, I would like to know how many of them do you think reads reviews?

Being that (pretty much) every multiplatform site has (at least) as many Wii gamers as PS3/XBox 360 gamers I think it is a fair assumption that Wii gamers are as much of their target audience as the more "Hardcore" PS3/XBox 360 gamers ... At the same time, being that many/most of these Wii gamers will defend games like Mario Kart (and argue that the review scores are not all that fair) it is a pretty good assumption that these reviewers don't even represent the views of the "Hardcore" gamers like they/you think they do.

Ever notice how rational discourse turns into trolling and personal attacks before long? I do get so tired of that...

The industry is just going through a different phase in one of its major cycles. Some would liken it to a pendulum swinging as well. Same basic metaphor: constant switching between extremes. Right now we're in the "simple" phase of the cycle. Come 2015 or so, we will be back in the "complex" phase of the cycle.

This is really nothing new, and I do wonder sometimes why people are shocked to learn that things are changing like this when we experienced near-identical shifts in 1985 and 1995 (from complex to simple and simple to complex, respectively). There was even a ridiculous level of outcry at those two points, too. Perhaps I'm one of the only ones keen on looking at what's come before to figure out what's coming next...

And those wii owners who read the reviews are disappointed with the scores of SMG,LOZ,SSBB,MKWii,RE4,MP3 and many more "hardcore" games that are on wii? Wow. Mario kart has 80ish score on metacritic, that is pretty good for a game that hasn't changed at all in what, 10 years?