Every gamer has imag­ined it at one point in their lives. The day when a vir­tu­al re­al­i­ty head­set or mo­tion cap­ture suit re­moves the ‘mid­dle man’ of a con­troller from the game play­ing ex­pe­ri­ence, and truly draws you into an es­capist vir­tu­al world where the lim­its of the cor­po­re­al do not apply. We could dance around our re­spec­tive liv­ing rooms, wield­ing un­re­al weapons or travers­ing alien ter­rain, and all with­out leav­ing the house thanks to tech­ni­cal in­no­va­tions that seem all but guar­an­teed to ar­rive at one point or an­oth­er.

The Wii, back in 2005 ap­peared to be our first ten­ta­tive step to­wards this new hori­zon, pre­sent­ing the idea of mo­tion con­trol through an in­no­va­tive re­mote shaped wand. Yes, the name was mocked, and the de­sign was likened to a Sky re­mote, but be­neath it all was an un­wa­ver­ing an­tic­i­pa­tion amongst ded­i­cat­ed gamers. The ini­tial teas­er trail­ers, demon­strat­ing sword fights, shoot-​offs and much more, caused a good deal of sali­vat­ing and set the stage for what many hoped would be the biggest leap in video gam­ing since the rise of the home con­sole. That of course was then, and this is now – 2009. We have now spent al­most half a decade get­ting to grips with Nin­ten­do’s ma­chine, and the story that has de­vel­oped over these years has, for many at least, been one of dis­ap­point­ment.

While it is dif­fi­cult to argue against the fact that Nin­ten­do has be­come one of the most suc­cess­ful video game cor­po­ra­tions in the world, bring­ing the medi­um to the mass­es and ex­tend­ing the bound­aries of what we thought pos­si­ble with an en­ter­tain­ment con­sole, they seem to have done so at a huge cost. Where once the epony­mous red ‘N’ sym­bol was syn­ony­mous with tan­ta­mount qual­i­ty, colour­ful and mem­o­rable char­ac­ters, and most im­por­tant­ly, un­mit­i­gat­ed fun; the birth child of the idolised Shigeru Miyamo­to has some­what dulled in its per­ceived colour – wash­ing from that vi­brant red of youth, to the grim cor­po­rate gray as its fields of pro­duc­tion have evolved to a bar­ren waste­land of cre­ativ­i­ty.

While this claim of com­plete re­ver­sal of com­mer­cial phi­los­o­phy may seem ex­treme, it takes only a mild in­ves­ti­ga­tion to un­cov­er its basis. To ex­am­ine as a start­ing point, for ex­am­ple, Nin­ten­do’s E3 con­fer­ence in June 2009, pro­vides a wealth of ev­i­dence. While now a fair num­ber of months in the past, it can still be seen as re­veal­ing in terms of the com­pa­nies’ ap­par­ent pre­sent strat­e­gy, and as such ap­pears an over­whelm­ing dis­ap­point­ment. One needs only look at the an­nounce­ments to get a flavour for the stale – re­cy­cled IP’s such as Mario, Zelda and Metroid ap­pear once again, sup­ple­ment­ed only by con­tin­u­a­tions in the ‘Wii-(Sports/Music/Fit etc.)’ fran­chise and unin­spir­ing third-​par­ty con­tri­bu­tions.

While the core se­ries’ in this list do have an un­de­ni­able qual­i­ty, it is hard to over­look the thin­ly veiled premise that Nin­ten­do is sim­ply milk­ing its most prof­itable fran­chis­es, with­out real thought as to how to ad­vance them­selves as a cre­ative com­po­nent of the in­dus­try. Com­bine this with an­oth­er shed load of ‘Wii Music’-type games and you are left with a truly di­lut­ed of­fer­ing to say the least.

In­deed, it is not only Nin­ten­do’s will­ing­ness to aban­don its own cre­ative fron­tiers, it is the fact that they so shame­less­ly allow third-​par­ty de­vel­op­ers to pro­duce sub-​par and near iden­ti­cal ti­tles under the vague um­brel­la of ‘ca­su­al ex­pe­ri­ences’; a term so wide­ly bat­ted about in the rhetor­i­cal ex­changes be­tween de­vel­op­ers and the re­spec­tive gam­ing press that it seems to have lost all mean­ing as a spe­cif­ic ref­er­ent. While ca­su­al gam­ing is by no means a thing to dis­cour­age, after all it has made games more ac­cept­ed in the main­stream, and ex­pand­ing ap­pre­ci­a­tion for the medi­um can be no bad thing; it is the fact that games for the Wii cur­rent­ly seem to in­ter­change ‘ca­su­al’ as a label for ‘lack­ing con­tent’ or ‘un­fath­omably easy’ with­out a sec­ond thought. Sure­ly the ap­peal of a game is to over­come an ob­sta­cle or chal­lenge? If such a chal­lenge is lack­ing the game be­comes an empty ex­pe­ri­ence, akin to an ac­tion film with­out stunts, a song with no in­stru­men­tal track. The basic struc­ture of the medi­um is sapped.

So how have we got here? What hap­pened to those as­pi­ra­tions to real time light sabre duels and true im­mer­sion? While it is fair to say some games have tried to tap into these fan­tasies, none have re­al­ly ex­celled. In fact, the most crit­i­cal­ly ac­claimed games on the Wii re­main those for which the pre­ferred method of con­trol is an old Game­Cube pad or the clas­sic con­troller, such as the su­perb Super Smash Bros. Brawl. The Red Steel’s of this world have come and gone, leav­ing lit­tle im­pres­sion be­yond a taint­ed mem­o­ry of clunky con­trols and un­re­alised game play me­chan­ics, pos­si­bly demon­strat­ing why so many de­vel­op­ers for the Wii, and pos­si­bly Nin­ten­do them­selves, have shied away from at­tempt­ing to fuse more ma­ture con­cepts with the tech­ni­cal in­no­va­tions.

How­ev­er, it seems rea­son­able to as­sume that it is not a lack of pos­i­tive crit­i­cal re­cep­tion that has truly al­lowed the stag­na­tion that we can wit­ness today. De­vel­op­ers have been panned in the past and yet have come back fight­ing, at­tempt­ing to bet­ter their mis­takes and still strive for that end goal. No, the ad­di­tion­al puz­zle to the piece is not an in­abil­i­ty to make more tra­di­tion­al games work on the Wii, more­over it is a lack of will­ing. With­out stun­ning con­trols, tra­di­tion­al gamers found the Wii’s lack of pro­cess­ing power frus­trat­ing com­pared to the al­ter­na­tives of the Xbox 360 and even­tu­al­ly the Playsta­tion 3. As with any medi­um, a lack of sales is going to re­sult in a change of tact, and in the case of the Wii, it was to ap­peal to a more fam­i­ly-​friend­ly, causal mar­ket. The de­vel­op­ers have seemed to sim­ply stop try­ing to force some­thing that, in their eyes, will not be. The Wii, in a sense has be­come a medi­um of its own, cater­ing to a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent au­di­ence and cre­at­ing a schism be­tween Nin­ten­do and the wider gam­ing com­mu­ni­ty. Whether this schism is of a nat­u­ral in­cli­na­tion or not is ques­tion­able, but what is un­de­ni­able, is that it has been the re­sult of eco­nomics and mar­ket ma­nip­u­la­tion.

Such anal­y­sis there­fore begs the ques­tion – what does the fu­ture hold for the Wii? With pre­dic­tions in­di­cat­ing that the next gen­er­a­tion of con­soles will not be with us for an­oth­er few years, the Wii has a fore­see­able shelf life and thus can be ad­dressed as a com­mod­i­ty with hope still in­vest­ed in it. While ad­vances such as the new ‘Mo­tion­Plus’, al­low­ing gamers 1:1 con­trol with their Wi­iMote, hints at Nin­ten­do look­ing be­yond sim­ply churn­ing out more party games which in­volve some manic wag­gling or sweep­ing, and to­wards games with a more sub­tle el­e­ment of input; the fact that we only now have been pre­sent­ed with this de­vel­op­ment, and that it was bun­dled with, and as­sumed­ly pri­mar­i­ly de­vel­oped for, Wii Sports Re­sort (es­sen­tial­ly Wii Sports 2) is in­dica­tive of the fact that Nin­ten­do are still very much placed in a comfy po­si­tion on their lau­rels. If viewed with a com­plete­ly hon­est eye, it seems un­like­ly that as long as the money con­tin­ues to pour in, Nin­ten­do are going to change their de­vel­op­ment strat­e­gy, or long term aims for the con­sole any time soon.

So what of us tra­di­tion­al gamers, and our lofty am­bi­tions for the ‘Rev­o­lu­tion’ that Nin­ten­do promised us with the Wii’s de­vel­op­ment title those five years ago? Well, with Mi­crosoft’s ‘Pro­ject Natal’ and Sony’s own im­pres­sive mo­tion cap­ture wand an­nounced at the same E3 that caused so much dis­ap­point­ment for long-​time Nin­ten­do fans, per­haps ‘press­ing X to jump’ re­al­ly is be­com­ing a thing of the past. While the Wii has taught us, if any­thing, to be cau­tious with our an­tic­i­pa­tion, one can’t help but feel the ex­cite­ment start to bub­ble again, as we sense an­oth­er era around the cor­ner…

http://theboar.org/games/2009/nov/27/wii-are-not-amused/

Blahblahblah Nintendo doesn't make good games anymore Blahblahblah Wii is for little kids and soccermoms Blahblahblah I want hardcore HD games Blahblahblah...

I'm so tired to death of these people... -___-'

Upcoming Wii games:

No More Heroes 2
Red Steel 2
Metroid Other M
Mario Galaxy 2
Endless Ocean 2
The Grinder
Monster Hunter 3
Dragon Quest X
Zelda Wii
Retro game
Final Fantasy TCB

... The list goes on, but I'll leave it at that. These people need to get a life or else sell their Wiis and go make love to their PS3s and 360s. Sheesh.

They're annoyed because Nintendo is at all trying to include anybody else.

I don't think their output has changed dramatically, in terms of quantity for the Core gamer. It's, ironically enough, a center of attention thing. Obviously, hardcore gamers are getting games from every party, they have no business demanding Nintendo or anybody else to completely exclude demographics they don't associate with.

If you really look at how many games have been targetted specifically at expanding the market, they haven't been that many compared to Core games. It astonishes me that such a scenario still inspires such reactions.

Oh well, gaming can't be taken seriously anyway.

Really? This is a response to E3 2009? 2009 is the one that was supposed to restore hope. More proof that Nintendo just can't do anything right for these people.

I played VR games at the arcades when they were still around.

I can honestly say that after that I never wanted such a future.

10 years=decade.

10/2=3?

Synonymous with tantamount quality+Unmitigated fun=3rd place.

Barren wasteland of creativity+Dulled in perceived color=1st place.

Lacking joie de vivre+Imbued with hues of tarantella=2nd place?

Sounds like two Gamecubes stuck together alright.

Sin and Punishment 2: The Secret Sequel to Wii Music.

Wii games = all fluff and no content

Am I reading a Wii game?

This paragraph is factually true if we: 1) Ignore games like Mario Galaxy, and 2) Pretend critics are more than just functionally retarded man-babies.

"Puzzle to the piece"?

"A lack of willing"?

"Change of tact"?

This is a casual article, isn't it?

I've read this paragraph four times. I still don't get it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKgPY1adc0A

And woopah? Please don't ever link to these clowns again.

didn't we already put up with this shit before? i mean if nintendo don't care about us we wouldn't get Metroid Other M or Galaxy 2 and some awesome upcoming 2010 software.. Nintendo are trying to appeal to everybody, thats there job as a gaming company, gaming is not just for us hardcores

I think some of these people need to leave gaming, honestly.

Or just buy a console you like, find happiness, enjoy a little silence too. We'll appreciate it.

Cheebee is pretty much spot on.

well i find it amusing


i even left him a nice comment telling him what i think he got wrong. i wonder if he will reply

i seen that comment lol