Games have been getting easier for a while. The hardest Zelda game is still the Oracel games for the GBC. WW, OoT and TP were all easy.

It´s more likely that you are no more a hardcore gamer if you ever have been than any of those games have lost their hardcore title.

Name one game that isn´t on the PS3 or any other PS that is great and that you like?

No need to get defensive. Besides, at what point did I say that God of War is a great example of what Nintendo should do? Sony makes many new games such as Patapon, Loco Roco and Echocrome and they end some of their old franchises (for example God of War ends with God of War 3) I can not say this about Nintendo now can I?

I can't seem to post my comment there so I will leave it here instead:


I'm somewhat at a loss as to how someone with all of the facts could come to this conclusion, so I guess I'll take a crack at clearing it up. I'm confident you will find it a more informed read than the article itself.

The majority of Nintendo's core IPs have already launched in the first ~18 months of the console's life and the two major titles (ie Mario & Zelda) are already confirmed in development for another Wii installment. In addition we already have murmurs of the Pikmin IP launching its first Wii installment next year and from the sounds of things Metroid will be coming around for another Wii game as well. With those titles on the table you clearly can't be expecting more from the existing IPs...right? I mean those have obviously been delivered...so was there some major IP from Nintendo that you were waiting for?

Well in that case games like Disaster Day of Crisis and even the new Wario Land game are certainly core titles (I hope you haven't written Wario off as casual...a mistake if you have). Then we have revisited series like Kid Icarus as well. There are also a few titles Nintendo has talked about behind closed doors as well and lets not forget what Nintendo has done with WiiWare, all of which caters to the old school Nintendo fanboy in pretty much every way and is never given the credit it deserves.

Of course all of this does show how Nintendo cannot win. On the one hand people will bash them if they don't constantly feed them new info on core titles and on the other hand they are bashed for not leaving enough of the pie for 3rd party devs who have done a tremendous job stepping up to the plate with titles like Deadly Creatures, SW: Force Unleashed, GH4 (awesome showing for Wii fans here), Mushroom Men, Ghostbusters The Video Game, ToS: DotNW, Arc Rise Fantasia, de Blob, SW: Clone Wars, Spyborgs, Sonic Unleashed, and the Conduit to name a few that I'm personally interested in.

The catalyst for this article certainly seems to be this E3 and there is a perfectly reasonable answer that has been given by Nintendo already. In an interview (link below) Mr Miyamoto made it very clear that Nintendo views E3 as their yearly chance to catch the expanded audience when they feel that they are actually paying attention. Why should Nintendo waste their E3 time talking to the core audience who listens every day of the year anyways? Fanboys like us who are always paying attention can get news the other 51 weeks But the expanded audience has a life and no time to keep up on a day to day basis so it makes perfect sense for the major media event to be focused on them. (Source: http://gonintendo.com/?p=49649).

The author of the article as well as Mr Artilip and the friends he has discussed (see comments below) are certainly entitled to be unimpressed by these showings but I think it would be a bit dishonest to make the claim that Nintendo has abandoned the core audience. Perhaps they are not catering to your tastes precisely but I think it is important to keep in mind that the plural of anecdote is not data. A sampling of people you know is a biased sample by definition and hardly a valid reason for blasting Nintendo for not delivering to the core audience at large...at best you have a case that they aren't catering to you. Of course if you were to phrase this article in its proper limited scope it wouldn't sound nearly as impressive.

And I'm sure many of these friends of yours are unhappy that we don't know what Nintendo is going to offer us in '09 or '10 since you can look ahead and see that FFXIII and GoW3 among other big titles are all clearly announced and coming for the other consoles. And to that I again ask you to listen to the men who run the show at Nintendo, this time the big cheese himself, Mr Iwata, spoke to this concern during the Nintendo Investor Relations Briefing in March of this year(Source: http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/library/events/080425qa/02.html, Q&A #8), where he had this to say:

"Of course, we are preparing for a variety of software for the latter half of this year [2008]. However, we are now feeling that the speed at which new information is consumed and made obsolete has become quicker than ever. When I think of today’s situation as a consumer, when I am exposed to new information too early on, I find that I am already tired of it when the product is launched. This is one of the reasons why we would like to keep news at bay until we really have to disclose them.

Rest assured that we are preparing for a variety of products for the latter half of this year and early next year. "

Only the core audience has an information over consumption problem which means hardcore titles are the most likely to be withheld and kept secret.

Of course, the entire article itself is written from a terribly flawed perspective to begin with. It asks the reader to suppose that fanboys are reasonable when it uses them for practically every example. Of course we all know that fanboys, almost by definition, are predisposed to have unreasonable expectations. And so it makes no sense that the article asks us to suppose that these unmet expectations are somehow proof of a problem. Hell, failing to meet fanboy expectations is par for the course, even MS and Sony have failed to meet their fanboy expectations. The bottom line is fanboys always want more, and they always complain when they don't get it.

Nintendo has delivered the majority of its core IP lineup, promised that more is coming from its core IPs, shown a continued effort in developing new core IPs and is even reinventing old core IPs and yet somehow this is not good enough because E3 wasn't what the fanboys had pictured. I think the absurdity of this idea speaks for itself to be quite honest.

Short version: This is at best a poorly researched and demonstrably false article and at worst an intellectually dishonest FUD piece. I'll give the author the benefit of the doubt and assume that it was the former.

Come on Rol, you know better than that. He never played or intend to play these games. He is just trying to look smarter than he really is. Just like the his comparisons between MGS and and Dostoyevsky (sic).

Maybe he knows some way to finish SMG in 15 minutes like every Mario up to Mario World. Maybe he got some strategy to breeze through hypermode. Maybe he did really find OoT much harder than TP. Or maybe he is just trolling and failing at it.

Wow, great OP. might be a bit short sighted. But the fact of the matter is, it would not have been written if there wasn't some truth to it.

you can´t post it because it´s too long, try and divide it in two posts and you should be fine.

Is Loco Roco considered a hardcore game now?

Nintendo's been creating more new IPs than anybody, with the Wii series (Sports/Play/Fit/Music), Brain Age series, Nintendogs series, Elektroplankton, and the whole Bit Generations series of games for GBA (Orbital, Sound Voyager, etc.).

@vaio,

No I trimmed it down to below 6k characters and it still wouldn't post.

ps3 fans are at it agian..