This is a very serious question. Boogie just missed 20k copies last week in the U.S. (by far the largest single market). I saw some advertising for the game on the web, and I heard of some on the television as well. I don't even know if those first day sales can cover the advertising costs. Not surprisingly, E.A. just announced a PS2 version as well. Dewy's Adventure sold less than 15k its first week in Japan as well and all but disappeared after that.
Boogie got browbeated by the reviewers, but so did Mario Party 8. Albeit Boogie did get worse reviews as far as I can tell (4.5 from a generous site like IGN says a lot), Mario Party 8 is not a perfect game by any means. However, it is made by Nintendo and is selling very well.
I am not saying third party games can't succeed on the Wii. There are several examples, including Red Steel, Rayman: Raving Rabbids, and Resident Evil 4: Wii edition (this one did sell solely on the merit of the game itself which had already been around for over a year), and various others. But is this absolute indifference of consumers towards some games that are obviously more oriented toward casuals going to push developers back to the 360 and the PS3?
The holiday should be more telling when we have numbers for games like Soul Calibur: Legends and Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles. We should pay a lot of attention to new third party IP's too, like Zack and Wiki.
Please add your thoughts. I am asking this as a serious question, so please try to be moderately civil.
We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. –Raoul Duke
It is hard to shed anything but crocodile tears over White House speechwriter Patrick Buchanan's tragic analysis of the Nixon debacle. "It's like Sisyphus," he said. "We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain...and it rolled right back down on us...." Neither Sisyphus nor the commander of the Light Brigade nor Pat Buchanan had the time or any real inclination to question what they were doing...a martyr, to the bitter end, to a "flawed" cause and a narrow, atavistic concept of conservative politics that has done more damage to itself and the country in less than six years than its liberal enemies could have done in two or three decades. -Hunter S. Thompson
