Malstrom: Mega Man herald of apocalypse (but game won't be all that great)

[bdbdbd]

@Onyxmeth:
1. No. Malstrom is intepreting Bozon correctly, even in the beginning of the review, Bozon says what the hardcore wanted from Megaman 9, was the tough-as-nails gameplay of Megaman 2. So what the "hardcore" wanted from this game, is for it to resemble the easiest game in the series. Read the review, you'll notice that Bozon is giving the impression Malstrom is talking about.
And even if we have a blue ocean game, it's not guaranteed to be a runaway success. What Capcom tries to pull out here, is NSMB.

2. The term wasn't there back then, but the elitist pricks were. During the NES days, the "PS360 hardcore", was the people who played games with gaming computers and PC:s. Nothing have changed, except what people and games were called. And Megaman 2 wasn't considered as a game for the "hardcore" of the time. There was the people who "had played G&W and liked the games, but..." and people who "had played Donkey Kong in the arcade and liked it, but...". You see the pattern?

3. I agree to an extent. DS is showing the audience expansion and a shift in core audience, which should apply to Wii too, but even Nintendo isn't after the shift, it wants the blue ocean gamers eventually to play the same games as the current core audience. But since everybody isn't going upstream, we end up having variety of game tastes.

4. I haven't played the new versions, or am not really familiar with them, so i can't really say whether they are blue ocean games or not, but they can be, there's no reason for them not to be.
We aren't lapsed gamers, at least most of us, although i could count myself as a former lapsed gamer, even that i didn't really quit gaming. But would have without the Wii and the DS. Anyway, Megaman 9 is for people who want nostalgia just as well as for the lapsed gamers. The problem is, that i doubt Megaman 9 is a game that sells a 250 system, so there needs to be more of them, and you find similar titles from Virtual Console (to me, even if Wii wouldn't have had anything aside Virtual Console, it would still have been a day one purchase). So in the end, Megaman 9 is for the Virtual Console customer, which mostly are the retro and lapsed gamers, in both cases, Megaman 9 qualifies as blue ocean game.

And yes, i do know what lapsed means and lapsed gamer is one of the blue ocean groups Nintendo wants to tap. You often see even the retro (only) gamers count in as lapsed gamers for the reason that they don't buy new games and from the market point of view these are lapsed, since they don't contribute anything, they are non-existing in the market. And since they virtually don't exist, the market doesn't cater to them.