the_dengle on 11 July 2012
I'm not exactly "anticipating" any Wii U games very strongly right now, but I suppose the one that has grabbed my attention the best is ZombiU. It just looks interesting.
P-100 and Pikmin both look good, but I don't really know enough about them yet to get hyped for either.
Oddly enough, I think the game I'm currently the most interested in after ZombiU is Nintendo Land. I'm still very skeptical about it, but I don't think people should be so quick to dismiss it, either. On the surface it looks like a shallow mini-game collection. If you look a bit more closely... those don't exactly look like mini-games to me. A couple of interviews have surface with a Nintendo Canada rep in the past week that shed a bit more light on the game; he says that the Nintendo Land attractions are "not just mini-games, but there's actually different levels, different things available in each of the attractions... a lot more than what was available in Wii Sports."
I mean, when I think of mini-games, I think of Mario Party or Wii Play. Sometimes there are 2 or 3 different "levels," but in the end it's not a lot of content. Nintendo Land has this wonderful potential to be more than a mini-game collection if Nintendo puts in the effort. Because honestly, what these games look like to me are not mini-games... they look like arcade games. And that's a fantastic distinction. If each of these attractions has at least... let's say 5 levels, this could be a collection of brand-new multiplayer arcade games from Nintendo inspired by some of their biggest core franchises. Who wouldn't get excited for a Metroid-inspired arcade game you can play with your friends?
Again though, the key is content. This has to be a fleshed-out experience with plenty of gameplay variety even between different levels of the same attractions, not reskins of the backgrounds. I have faith that Nintendo can pull it off if they try to. Until I hear more, I remain skeptical but curious.
