Games

Where Do Wii Go From Here?

By Geoff Goldhar
February 25, 2008 - 08:00

Okay, so Super Smash Bros. Brawl is out in practically two weeks. You won’t find anyone more jazzed for it than me. I mean, I’m the kind of guy who listens to the soundtrack and gets all weak in the knees when he hears a remix of Type B from Tetris . But there’s something odd about Nintendo’s big-release for the first quarter of '08.

It doesn’t use the motion-sensing at all. I mean at all, not even for pointing at menus. It’s a rather odd thing. I mean, notably they want to maintain the same feeling as the franchises’ previous games, and the Wii Remote doesn’t really work for 2D fighting games that well... But it’s odd. (There are even pictures of the games creator playing with a Nintendo GameCube controller, and only the Nintendo GameCube controller).

In fact it doesn’t seem like anyone has actually…grasped the Wii Remote yet, so to speak. Outside of Nintendo, most Wii Remote functionality is delegated to simple movements, replacing “Press A”, with “Move the remote up NOW.” It seems as though that developers don’t have the time or the money to finagle games that incorporate full motion controls outside of a pointer or some vague movement. Even big name games like The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess and Super Mario Galaxy reduced the majority of Wii-interactivity to pointing and wiggling your arm at the screen. Other games like Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn and the aforementioned Brawl do away with even the most basic functionality and leave everything to the face buttons.

The reason that I’m saying this now is because at the GDC this year, EA unveiled head-tracking for an upcoming game called Boom Blox. ( http://gonintendo.com/?p=36198 ) You may have seen the YouTube video of that guy who reversed the “dialogue” of the Sensor Bar and Wii Remote (see below). He mounted the Wii Remote on the TV, and wore two LED sensors on his glasses, much like the Sensor Bar. Using this he could move his head and look “around the screen”, creating the illusion of depth WITHIN the television.. Then using a second Wii Remote, he was able to point around and shoot targets. Very novel application, and it appears EA wants to attempt something similar.

It’s really a direction developers have to take, trying new things with the hardware, attempting STRANGE things with the hardware. When the Nintendo DS came out, a lot of the applications of the Touch Screen were rather pedestrian, limiting the thing to basically a second series of buttons.. It wasn’t a year until, you know, people actually TRIED some real innovation and struck a balance between quirky and non-functional and functional and incredibly boring. This is what I hope is happening with the Wii, and we start seeing third parties putting out more odd, quirky games, rather than “$19.99 Shovelware Funpack Extravaganza” It’s sad because it seems as though the system is becoming a home to these cheap, poorly made games.

I mean if you read Masahiro Sakurai’s GDC interview about Brawl , he goes on and on about years of thought and planning put into every aspect of the game. I wish every game had that level of…well... Love put into it. Because that’s truly what it’s all about for any sort of artistic endeavor; Love what you do, and what you create. When I look over the wall of Wii selections at retailers, I have a hard time finding anything within that level of creative adoration towards one's own work… Some games like Zack & Wiki: Quest for Bararos' Treasure , and No More Heroes demonstrate this level of care and time applied to the games creation, but not many more.

A lot of the problem is that the Wii is treated primarily like a toy in the Japanese market. Your average Xbox 360 owner will purchase seven games over the consoles lifespan, this number varies WILDLY depending on how dedicated one is to the

medium, but seven is the likely number. Your average Japanese gamer owns Wii Sports . Most others will own Wii Sports , Wii Play , and Wii Fit ... Other popular titles will include the first party ‘champions’ of the system – Mario , Zelda , Metroid Prime 3: Corruption ... Here it seems to be shaping up the same way. A large number of third party publishers aren’t really bringing their A-Game to the table, besides Capcom who has done some astounding things so far. Japan is where most of Nintendo’s “big” games come from, and in the last few generations only a small portion of truly significant Nintendo titles have come from North America or Europe (Especially since Rare took their ball and went to Microsoft. And now Goldeneye might be on Xbox Live.)

Nintendo will be pushing some new functionality on the system in '08, the most striking thus far to be the promise of new Wii Ware games and Downloadable Content, which brings up the problem of storing titles on the Wii’s rather meager storage capacity, but they say they’ll compress the games and “stream” them from compression, expanding and reducing content as it’s required during play. That sounds tricky and such storage problems may hinder development of titles.. But having an online marketplace full of interesting, unique, cheap (key word) titles has worked wonders for Xbox Live and, to a smaller extent, the Playstation Network.

Not that any of this matters immediately. You can barely keep a Wii in a store long enough to warm up from the inside of the delivery truck. The system is a fiscal monster that eats people’s money and craps solid GOLD. The Wii is an amazing system solely because EVERYONE has some insane story about how they got their own!

“ How did you get that glass eye, Mike?”
“ Mario Galaxy is awesome!”
“ I see.”

But as soon as everyone who wants one, has one, they’re going to want games for it... And considering even the best Wii titles barely scrape the price point of the cheaper PS3 titles, people are going to able to afford to buy a lot of them… The market requires innovation on a grand scale, this isn’t next-gen graphics, but next-gen gameplay, and it appears that the latter is going to be a lot harder to produce than we thought.

Geoff Goldhar - Wrestled a Baltic Squid for his Wii. True story.

Last Updated: August 31, 2023 - 08:12