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You don't change how games are played and have everybody adapt to it instantly. It's a fantasy that game developers can just spontaneously go from a button-centric gameplay design to a camera-and-motion-centric gameplay design overnight. On top of that, most of the big-name companies are putting their lowest-tier programmers on their Wii projects and giving them piss-poor funding just so they can have a token presence on the system. This all adds up to a lot of shovelware from developers who should know better.

Almost anybody who was a gamer during the latter half of the 1980s would not find this surprising, as the NES had the same effect on PC game developers. There too, waves of poor shovelware that was usually conversions of PC games to NES led a lot of gamers to ignore the big-name third parties and give a chance to the smaller ones like the then-emerging studios Capcom, Hudson, Konami, and so forth.

The developers of the past are a dying breed on the Wii, even as they remain strong on the PS3 and 360. Don't expect many of them to catch on. Instead, look to the well-made WiiWare titles to see who our next wave of brilliant developers will be. It is they, not with the ones who put out endless waves of shovelware onto the Wii, who hold the industry's future.



Sky Render - Sanity is for the weak.