I'm sorry but Maelstrom is a petty little douche who couldn't write his way out of a paper bag. Once in awhile, he brings up a good point about the Wii and Nintendo but his unabashed douchiness over the company vastly outweighs whatever valid points he may have to anyone reading his "articles" with a reasonable amount of temperance.

Wow, and Copernicus' denial of a solar-centric system was eaten up by the masses while reviled by the church! Great point!

If there was a time where I could drive to someone's house and physically facepalm them, this point would be it.

Shit, I happen to think Sony has created the best D-pad used in an OEM controller over the past 15 years. Some hate it, some love it. Stop proclaiming it as the best because I know plenty of people (non-Sony clones, mind you) who think it's a brilliant D-pad for an OEM controller.

To be frank, IR pointing is very different from motion controls.

IR works great with RE4 or on-rail shooters or point and click adventures, but motion controls haven't worked that well in all the Wii games I own, not even the best of them. Sometimes they trigger digital events, and they are not as reliable at that as a simple button press. Sometimes they use the wiimote inclination as a substitute for an analog stick, but hardly as precise and sensitive.

Their best use to this date is in games such as Wii Sports which really work with the motions and accelerations, and of course WM+ will help.

Okay, I started gaming on the Atari VCS when it was the VCS and not the 2600 and when Combat and Video Olympics were the pack-ins not Pac-Man. The 2600 was full of hardcore games basically, it had all of the great games from the Golden Age of the Arcades like Defender, Ms. Pac-Man, and many more. I had 60 + games from a variety of studios for my 2600.

Then I had a Colecovision. And an Adam. So far I haven't seen a Nintendo home port of Donkey Kong as close to the original as the Adam version was where DK scales the building carrying Paulina, and then the game switches to the "How High Can You Go?" screen not to mention that the game pak came in a perfect cardboard replica of the arcade cabinet. Some of if not the coolest pacakging ever for console games.

Then console games died. However, I had an IBM pc jr. and started getting into early pc games and especially Sierra and Infocom adventure games.

Then I did pick up an NES their first Christmas (actually my grandparents bought it for me) because I had played some of the arcade games that had conversions on NES earlier that Summer at Myrtle Beach like Pro Wrestling ( I grew up in the South, watching WCW on TBS starting back when it was Channel 17 and also still showing programs like Rod Serling's Night Gallery at night and Spectre-Man and Space Giants in the afternoon after school), Tag Team Wrestling, and Kung-Fu. And because I liked robots (I also had Ideal's Maxx Steele) However, I never cared much for NES. It didn't have the same types of graphics or evolved stories as to be found in PC and PC Jr. games. I thought most of its games were rather bland.
The port of Double Dragon looked nothing like the arcade version.

Then I got TG-16 and Genesis. Followed a couple of years later by SNES. Along with GBA, the only Nintendo console that I ever thought was worthwile and that largely due to the Square games.

Then Playstation came around bringing all the great Japanese games with it that one would read about in magazines but seldom see ported to the US. And PS2 did an even better job at this.

I also had an xbox and liked Halo and I especially liked it for its better ports in the last gen than the PS2 received, for the fact that they had Shenmue 2 (which I thought would mean they would receive also get Shenmue 3 and 4 at later dates), and Halo wasn't too bad. However, imo xbox never came anywhere near PS2 in real number of quality games.

In all this time, Nintendo just went along just releasing a couple of systems (not talking about their handhelds) that had a few must have games on them (1 or 2 each gen) but being rather inoffensive in the process. Hey, they were kid's consoles. No reason to hate on them just because of Mario Party. If anything it was okay to feel a little sorry for them. After all, they had lost the best thing they ever had going for them in Squaresoft.

Then this gen started. 360 came out of the gate doing gangbusters because of the scarcity of their console and some key third-party games. Then a year later PS3 and Wii launched. PS3 was going to have a steep price tag, but it had the power to really put cinematic gaming back on the level it hadn't been on since the Golden Age of PC Adventure games. And the Wii one could hope it would continue to be a showcase for Nintendo's one or two great games. In a best case scenario for the Wii, it would sell much better than N64 and GCN and have a game library as strong as the GBA or DS.

Instead, the Wii launches and starts to dominate the industry. However, the games it is dominating the industry with fly in the face of the notion of videogames as a new art form. Largely, they are very bland titles that seem to be geared to give great games an even worse blow than fps games did when they did away with high quality pc adventure games in the 90s.

If you were one of the ones hoping for FFVII to look as good as a Hollywood movie when this gen started the Wii's really not your console.

I guess the hatred towards the Wii comes about because it flies in the face of what people traditionally want in their console and it became popular for whatever reason with enough people that it not only flies in the face of what they want from a console but also to be a threat to what people want from a console using an install base of people many of which never really ever had any dreams or aspirations of where gaming should strive to go ever before in their lifetimes. Probably not a valid reason to hate it but to be very apprehensive about what it might do to gaming and in what new direction it might take it right at the moment when games seemed most set to truely emerge as a respected artistic medium.

You just gave me brainfreeze without me eating anything cold with that bolded part. Wow.

He doesn't get it anymore than Nintendo "got it" durring their last E3. You can't just ignore the people whose backs you built your company on. You have to spend some of that effort on them. Throw them a bone... a new Zelda or Kid Icuras. It doesn't take much, but to ignore them during the biggest event in gaming like they did is crazy. What will they do when Sony and Microsoft get on their A game next gen? They did a great job one upping their competition, but now they understand the way they'll be looking for the next game changer in all directions. I don't hate Nintendo and really besides my NES I've never had a Nintendo system as my main gaming system ever. I want ballance in the force and I think Microsoft is our best bet right now and if Sony can get it's game back in order things will start to look better.

As usual, Malstrom has done another awesome blog entry. :)

Sadly, I have to agree that that's pretty much his methodology, which at times leads him to stretch the truth to painful lengths. That said, he's still defininitely worth a read: get beyond the arrogance and ignore the points with only tortured support (and everything non-gaming related), and you get a guy who has a unique perspective on the gaming industry. He's an invaluable source for otherwise-overlooked quotes and information (the latest example being his article on WiiWare's purpose), and most of the time he offers good food for thought.

I also think you're doing him too much of a disservice when you say he's essentially guessing; the man puts a lot of thought into his writings, and most importantly he shows you his support and thought process every step of the way. You can (and should) evaluate said process to decide whether you agree with him or not, but he's not just throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks.

Finally, and those goes more towards others than yourself, it should be noted that while he absolutely loathes Microsoft (I ignore him when he brings up the Microsoft Boogeyman) he's not exactly a shill for Nintendo either: he has a vision of what disruption is and how it should apply to gaming, and when Nintendo veers from what he thinks it should do he will call them out on it. The latest example I can think of is Mario Galaxy being a lesser game, disruption-wise, than New Super Mario Bros., but there are plenty of others as well.

 I'm sorry that The Casuals ran over your dog and pissed in your Wheaties, but you gotta let it go man...

noname, it´d be interesting if you read some of his articles and pointed out the parts you think he´s wrong and why....maybe it´d make for a very interesting thread, and since you´re one of the most respected and unbiased users here, a good discussion could happen...just an idea :)