Wii Games to buy (made by 3rd parties)

Boom Blox
No More Heroes
Zack & Wiki

BUY THEM!

The current largest problem for wii games are that good 3rd party efforts get often burried by shovelware in terms of sales.

Okami is the largest riddle for me - i know it didn't sell well on PS2, and i know it's a prt of the 2 years old game, but still - why such a poor reception on the Wii when reviewers are crying that it's one of the major overlooked games ever, that it's the pinnacle of gaming? And it should somewhat cater to the Zelda public.

Exactly, people go off of name recognition. How do you think Nintendo got the name recognition they have? Luck? The reason Nintendo has such a hardcore following is they've had some 20 years of high quality games being pushed out. Even their crappiest crap tends to at least be entertaining. Gamers are dedicated to Nintendo because Nintendo has remained dedicated to gamers.

Now take these other developers, who essentially piss all over their customers by saying "well, they don't know any better, so we're not going to bother putting those features into our games..."

Sure, they may not know any better... NOW, but every point a consumer gets screwed is a consumer who is going to get a little wiser the next time they buy, and eventually the only ones those consumers will go with are the ones that haven't pissed on them.

Something up there decreed it, puny humans won't change it 

Okami so far has no other data. I know it doesn't get commercials but whatever. The problem is, people are debating whether the Wii version is even better than the PS2 one at all. Nintendo Power  telling people to play the Wii version instead certainly doesn't help things either. The credits are taken out from the end or something and I'm not sure if it was $40 or not. Okami wasn't like RE4, which was better on the Wii than the GameCube in every way.

And just in case someone asks, the ways are: control, option to the use the gamepads just in case (both GC and Classic Controller), all the content of the PS2 version, all the gameplay fixes of the PS2 version and PAL GC version, a lower price tag at release, almost no slowdown thanks to the Wii's memory.

Any others I missed? I don't have the game, so I'm just going by what I heard. 

I'm not sure whether I ever used the word shovelware, well actually I'm very sure I didn't use it because I used it for the first time ever in this very sentence. Reviews in the aggregate effectively become a reasonably objective measure of quality, otherwise you can simply use budget which is highly correlated with high production values which translates into a quality game almost always. Either way it is not a particularly important point.

There are however plenty of low budget games that have sold extremely well on the Wii. You should have a look for them.

There is however, clear evidence that low budget games can be very lucrative for developers on the Wii. More to the point, a number of very successful Wii games have relatively low production values. Therefore, there seems to be evidence that Wii owners care less about the quality of the software relative to owners of other consoles, and therefore there is lower incentives for developers to make quality software and thus they don't. Game developers simply have a reduced incentive to work as hard on games on the Wii than they do on other consoles, which is reflected in the sense that they don't work as hard on Wii games - and that is surely not a contestable point.

At the end of the day, my theory starts with the hypothesis that developers are rationally responding to market incentives, whereas everyone else is out there loosely referring to conspiracy theories and assuming companies must be insane. Conspiracy theories are a highly unlikely event and if possible the mass insanity of game developers is even less likely (in fact its absurd). The answer has to lie with there being screwed up incentives for Wii developers and this is likely to be the case whether Wii gamers wish to believe it or not. Just don't expect there to be a huge increase in the quality of third party developed games any time soon, you'll just end up disappointed.

But I'm largely over debating the point, afterall it appears clear that Wii owners here would rather simply whinge than try to understand anything that is going on in the marketplace.

Except ubisoft is the only major developer doing that. Either ubisoft sees something they don't, or there is no incentive to make almost nothing but shovelware for the Wii.

BTW, I didn't claim you called them shovelware. I was, and am, stating that is what those games are.

BTW, I just realized why Twilight Princess couldn't be a lazy port. It's not a port. A port is a completed game. The GC version was delayed because the development team was trying to complete the Wii version in time for launch.

Hence it was not a port. It's a multiplatform release.

So developers are truly the lazy ones, since they just assumed it was a port with waggle.