That definitely shows that Nintendo is increasing support in that direction, and I'm sure Malstrom reads any move in that direction as a terrible thing.  However, my question is how much they are going to do.  There is no indication of that.  He very well could have meant the couple of DSiWare games that have come out with a focus on UGC.  That article was from 13 months ago, and we still haven't seen or heard much.

His theory about Zelda could explain why every Zelda after Ocarina of Time has felt so bland to me.

He lacks faith in Nintendo's ability to re-invent the Zelda wheel with Wii. I think they will, because they should understand by now that the proper, Motion Plus Zelda is going to be the holy grail of motion-controlled gaming. This is the game that will make the world get it

Nintendo would be idiots not to see that, but i guess i have more faith in their ability to really nail motion gaming than he does.

It isn't his lack of faith in Nintendo but the inability of Aonuma to give Zelda the proper game that Motion plus can deliver.

Well, Malstrom's thinking is that Nintendo started out on UGC and then was "stunned" when Wii Music bombed, and has been reorganizing ever since.  I'm not 100% convinced of this, frankly Nintendo has been guilty of many software dry spells over the years, but it's plausible.

...

On Malstrom's lack of faith in Motion-controlled Zelda, I think he believes Nintendo can pull off the controls, but I know he thinks the overall structure and direction of the series has been wrong for years and will continue to haunt this game.

I think Malstrom would want to see this game ditch 90% of the cut-scenes, NPCs, and puzzles from recent 3D Zeldas and add a lot more combat.  He wants the overall game structure to be similar to the original Legend of Zelda: lots of fighting, a tough overworld, and items that help more in combat than in puzzle-solving.  (edit: Also the ability to solve dungeons out of order).

I think what he believes he is going to get is something similar to the existing 3D games but with motion controls added.  To his mind this is a failure because the long cutscenes and boring puzzles are going to scare away the lapsed gamers (like himself) and the newcomers.  I actually strongly agree even though I like the cutscenes and don't mind the puzzles.

Yeah, i never bought that either. There are only a few teams with a big ol' question mark over them anymore, with most of Nintendo's development staff we can be reasonably sure of what they are or were doing around early 2009, when the realization that Wii Music wasn't going to take off should have kicked in. The only teams we really don't know about are a few of Intelligent Systems' teams, and HAL Labs. So under Malstrom's theory, only they could possibly have been working on UGC projects that got terminated. The rest is just poor long-term planning on Nintendo's part.

User Generated Content works, if the community cares enough about the game to take total ownership over it, and has a vested interested in evolving the game towards what they find best matches their interests. Also, if you facilitate this happening, it is more likely to happen.

However, user generated content alone doesn't build a community around a game, nor is it meant to be a substitute for providing good content out of the box. There are numerous failures where it was believed that if "you put out the parts, the community will assemble it" and they didn't.

For more on this, look up "crowdsourcing".

BTW, you can do UGC, just make it fun, not a chore of make it obvious you have to learn things. Mario Paint is UGC, and it kicks ass. If Wii music had followed that mold, it might have worked a lot better.

Wii Music's failure wasn't really about UGC, imo. It was part of Wii Music's identity crisis overall. I think it would have been more successful if Nintendo had more strictly defined it as UGC (compose your own songs) or just made it a Guitar Hero clone with waaay more instruments

Not that the latter would have been a good idea in terms of creativity, but at least people would have had a better grasp of what Wii Music was.

I don't buy it because Nintendo is pretty much on the same pace they have been on in the past three generations.  Unless there is another big drought next year, I think the claim is false.

As for Zelda, I wouldn't mind a lot more combat.  That is something I usually don't get enough of.  I still want to keep the puzzles, NPCs, and cut-scenes though.  The cut-scenes are rarely longer than a minute or two anyway.

I wonder why he is pushing so hard for a return to the original Zelda style.  I've seen him make mistakes with the sales of the Zelda series before, so I wonder if he thinks it is the best selling.  It is second behind OoT, and if you include the Wii and GC versions of TP, it falls to third.

*see my next post for clarification