This was a ...strange ... year for Wii owners. On one hand, Nintendo has aggressively expanded in the market, forging forwards in the sales charts off the back of massive successes with Wii Fit and the continued popularity of the Wii Sports pack-in. Of course, unless you count yourself amongst the most banal of mainstream Wii-owning society (and come on, you're reading IGN, so clearly you've impeccable taste and common sense), then jaunts of Wii Fit and the occasional tennis match just aren't enough to keep you going long-term. You need more. And no, you don't want another half-assed port of a PlayStation 2 game that's ugly as sin and plays terribly. You want quality, and as far as the Wii is concerned, that means you need titles developed exclusively for the system to take advantage of its unique controls and *ahem* special technical abilities.
| Wii Exclusive Title | Review Score |
| Boom Blox | 8.1 [US] |
| Castlevania Judgment | 7.5 [US] |
| de Blob | 8.4 [US] |
| Disaster: Day of Crisis | 8.0 [UK] |
| Endless Ocean | 8.1 [AU] |
| Mario Kart Wii | 7.9 [AU] |
| No More Heroes | 8.5 [AU] |
| Samba de Amigo | 7.5 [US] |
| Skate It | 8.5 [US] |
| Super Smash Bros. Brawl | 9.3 [AU] |
| Wario Land: The Shake Dimension | 8.3 [AU] |
| Wii Fit | 8.3 [AU] |
| Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure | 9.1 [AU] |
This year, 15 Wii exclusive titles stood out in our eyes (officially defined as scoring more than 7.5) as deserving of your attention. Of these, Super Smash Bros. Brawl stands as about the best, at 9.3. With Brawl, Nintendo has once again demonstrated its fundamentally unmatched breadth of characters and franchises, giving players a stupidly large amount of content to unlock, while also providing fans of the previous games plenty to chew on. The general consensus is that Melee still stands as the most polished of the fighting games, but nobody can challenge Brawl's variety.
In terms of original content, Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure hit Australia at the start of the year, and stunned us with its originality and inventive mechanics. Sure, it's a little cutesy on the surface, but it has the gameplay to back it up. It's a great puzzle game and genuinely different from basically everything else out there. No More Heroes opened the door to more avant-garde, adult gaming from creator Suda 51. It took elements of open-world, sandbox adventures and married it to a strange and entertaining story of assassinations and, erm, lawn mowing. Certainly, the Wii has pushed gameplay into strange, new territories – and once in a while, developers still take risks.
Steven Spielberg's first foray into videogames (or, funding videogames, anyway) came in the form of the excellent physics-based puzzler, Boom Blox. EA's cartoony Jenga-like game didn't set the sales charts on fire, but it did prove that the developer could master the Wii's motion controls and make a compelling gameplay experience from something as simple as stacking – and knocking down – blocks.
Endless Ocean and Disaster: Day of Crisis are two more releases that take very different concepts - oceanic exploration and surviving natural disasters - and created Wii-specific gameplay that genuinely can't be matched by other systems. And with Wii Fit, the balance board becomes an intrinsic part of the experience too - so much so that it's selling systems. This is the kind of exclusive content that can make Wii owners proud long-term, even if 2008 has been a somewhat 'dry' year.
Must-Buy Wii Exclusives of 2008:
Super Smash Bros. Brawl
&
Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure
To re-iterate before kicking into page two: a few things you need to know about our system exclusives head-to-head:
- We're using IGN AU review scores wherever they're available. If we didn't review it, we're using the U.S. team's score. And if they didn't review it, the U.K.'s.
- We've set a score of 7.5 out of 10 as the benchmark for inclusion in the feature.
- While this is a console showdown, we're not counting games as exclusives if they're also on PC. Sorry 360 fans – Left 4 Dead doesn't count.
- We're only including games available at retail. As mentioned we'll be doing a full showdown between WiiWare, PSN and XBLA in the next day or so.
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here the missing wii part, shame on the TO
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Improvements are caused by people who complain
