http://www.play-nintendo.com/playnintendo/content.php?content_id=1373

I have absolutely no idea if this particular group will be capable of making a great game, but Zoonami -- former rare devs, including the director/producer of Goldeneye and Perfect Dark -- are now hiring Wii specific coders.

Interesting.

sounds cool, that kind of talent could definitely get me interested!

Zoonami? is this like a cartoon network based property where they take Toonami shows and make them video games? lol sorry but the titles are to similar.

 Heh. To be honest, I'm a bit skeptical. Coming from a Blizzard-fanboy perspective, it's amazing how many games have been produced "by a couple of guys who left Blizzard," and most of those have been... okay to pretty good games, with a few exceptions. Nothing exceptional. 

Or put more generally, I've noticed that games made by "a couple of guys who used to work for this company that made a great game once," often end producing average games. Not that this is necessarily the case here! Obviously, this is a small pattern observed only by me, and there certainly could be exceptions even if my observations are fair.

I'm just saying... I'm witholding judgement for now.  

True.  Look at Sakaguchi.  He was a brilliant developer with Square, but now that he has left he has made Blue Dragon and ASH, both of which are decent but far below the standards set by current RPGs.  A lot of great developers and development companies are co-depandant on each other. 

The most interesting of these situations I think is turning out to be Clover (creators of awesome games like Okami and Viewtiful Joe) and Shinji Mikami (the genius behind the RE series and RE4) to form a new studio called PlatinumGames (formerly Seeds Inc.).  This is such an amazing group of developers, and since it was an entire studio that formed this new one rather than just a few developers trying to make it on their own, they should be capable of the same great things they were when they were in Capcom.  Anyway, they reportedly have 2 Wii projects in the works which I hope turn out to be great.  One of those titles is being made together with Suda 51.  

I don't get why Blue Dragon is seen as less than outstanding. In Japan (the market it was targeted at) it was a critical darling, receiving such scores as 37 out of 40 from Famitsu. Im pretty sure ASH was on Famitsu's most wanted at one stage as well.

Famitsu hardly counts as a credible review source since they throw high scores at pretty much any big game regardless of quality. Blue Dragon was a good game, but the fact that it completely failed to impress critics outside of Japan shows it was lacking in many areas. I expect ASH to do even worse...

I'm not saying that Sakaguchi can't make good games anymore, but I will say that I think Lost Odyssey is a "last chance" for him. At least in my eyes. If he does a great job with it, then I think he has a bright future, but if it turns out bad, then he'll pretty much fall from my interest.

It's Rare all over again; when they left Nintendo, they simply lost the magic touch. Sakaguchi is way too conservative to impress any more, that's why his games get somewhat low scores.