The Wii is selling very well but there seems to be a dearth of decent titles available. Maybe I’m just getting older and more mature and this means I don’t enjoy video games as much. God forbid. There just don’t seem to be a whole lot of titles available for the Wii that interest me. I think Rock Band looks kind of cool but with a lack of downloadable content I’m not really interested at all.
I’ve got Twilight Princess, Resident Evil VI, and I’ve played Super Mario Galaxy but there are few other games that interest me other than Mario Kart and the upcoming Force Unleashed.
I’d think a console that sold so well would have a bigger variety of games I want to play. As it is the X-Box and PS3 have more games I’d like to try than the Wii.
This is probably a complaint others have made so I apologize for my lack of originality.
I’m feeling the same way, really. I got a Wii + Mario Galaxy for xmas 2007, finished MG in about a week, and then the Wii gathered dust until Mario Kart came out (late April, IIRC.) Beat Mario Kart in 2 days and then it gathered dust until about a week ago when I downloaded SMB2, Mario64, and bought a Gamecube controller and 2 games (Metroid Prime and Tales of Symphonia.)
It’s kind of sad that the best games for Wii seem to be games from other systems.
I’d be really happy with an original, sword and sorcery type turn-based RPG and a deep racing simulator. For some reason I’m not holding my breath.
Edit: I didn’t really follow the Gamecube but looking at the selection of Gamecube games vs. PS2 and Xbox1, I think Gamecube suffered the same problem - too few games, and virtually no killer app.
There are good games but I’m getting kind of annoyed at this point that so much of the software market would rather stick their fingers in their ears and pretend that the Wii’s market doesn’t exist. I know it’s easier to sell “photorealistic graphics” (a promise going back fifteen years) to that huge teenager market than it is to sell them “It’s fun!” and old prejudices are running deep but there’s an obvious market sitting there ready to throw money at people who develop and release triple-A titles for it.
The fact that the Wii keeps selling like mad despite the fact that getting software support is like pulling teeth is a testament to just how badly the market has been misread. They’ve been sitting in their ivory towers surrounded by yes-fans and getting positive reinforcement on some foolish behavior and dismissing the people who like playing video games but don’t care for the current market as “not real gamers”. And now that those “not real gamers” have emerged as a dominant market force they’d still rather deny it.
Watch what emerges at E3 since it will say a lot about the industry mindset but you’ll have to read between the lines. It’s this Christmas is roughly when the dominance of the Wii should be bearing fruit but I have heard nothing that makes me think that game companies are not continuing with their old prejudices.
Coincidentally we might finally see a real challenge to the Wii in hardware finally this weekend with the X-Box 360 having its first major price drop tomorrow. It brings the hardware cost of the system down to $300 which puts it past a major psychological hurdle.
If this ends up effecting Ninty negatively, I’ve heard speculation about Wii halving half the life of the other Current Generation consoles, and then jumping for 360-like hardware halfway through this generation’s race. Meaning we may very well get a “Wii HD” announced at next years E3 (or maybe a bit later).
I’ve thought of that before and I like the idea of a couple years off the cycle with an emphasis on a stable long term platform (which Nintendo did well with Wii and Sony has done decently with both updated Playstations but Microsoft was surprisingly bad at) at a lower price point. I’d like to think that both Sony and Microsoft have learned the hard lessons of overshooting the hardware curve between the incredible expensive of early hardware and massive failure rate respectively.
No More Heroes got great reviews, IIRC. I’ve never played it myself, though. Trauma Center: Under the Knife is good, and makes nice use of the motion sensing functionality. As long as you haven’t played the DS version, it’s a nice game.
Rock Band and Guitar Hero III are both great games if you can get past the fact they you’re playing little plastic instruments, and the higher price tag. But yeah, the fact that the other consoles have DLC for these games but the Wii doesn’t sucks ass.
Personally, I think (hope) one of Nintendo’s big announcements at E3 is going to be some kind of large storage option for the Wii. Either a new version with a hard drive (or at least much more SSD capacity, like at least a few gigs,) or something along the lines of a USB drive.
It’s interesting. The Wii is more powerful than the original Xbox and the GameCube and massively more powerful than the PS2. And plenty of “epic” games were released for those systems. Why third-party game developers now think that making an epic game for the Wii is so ridiculous I’ll never know.
Ain’t that the truth. An article in the New York Times a few months ago was practically crowing that “the Wii fad is over!” after what it perceived as dismal sales for Smash Bros Brawl.
Of course, those predictions of dismal sales didn’t jive with reality and the writer of the article had to lie and create figures out of whole cloth in an attempt to sell it. One particulary jarring example actually said that SSBB was a failure because it only sold 2.7 million copies in it’s first three weeks. The topselling PS3 game at the time had only sold 2 million copies during a period of a year.
Actually one of my fav. Wii games has been Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn*
I was a huge fan of FFTactics on the Playstation, and when I heard the Wii had a tactics game, I had to pick it up. It’s been quite a fun ride, and I’ve enjoyed it (my next purchase will probably be a Gamecube controller and a used copy of the Fire Emblem game that was released on GC).
I really do hope they add more tactics games to the Wii, as I remember there were TONS of them for the PS2, and I know Disgaea 3 will be on the PS3, but I don’t have that system. So I hope the Wii will try to keep up a bit on that market front.
I can attest that it’s a very fun game. It’s also an extremely psychotic game. Definitely intended for mature audiences, not only due to the violence and gore, but also the mindfuckery. I spent the last half of the game going “WTF? WTF? WTF? …Bahahaahah, no, WTF?” I was relieved when I finally beat the game that I wouldn’t have to go through more craziness, thought it over, then started a new save file.
If you can ride the weirdness wave, it’s a good game.
On the other hand the story line was more logical and well reasoned than the last three Metal Gear Solid games.
It is a lot of fun albeit with some rough edges. I’d rather have had a more straight beat-em-up with that wonderful control scheme but what they have in the game is cool. Every time I moved up a rank in the assassins I said “What kind of insane fight am I up against now?”
Keep an eye on** The Conduit**. The developers are trying to make this The FPS to own on Wii. The graphics look sick – hopefully the gameplay will be on par:
I heard of another game that says they’re really pushing the envelope with the Wii’s hardware. I can’t remember what the game was called, but the video was this roman bath type of pool, with different light sources and roman armor and such in there.
We got a Wii for Joph Jr’s birthday last March and, if I had to do it all over again, I would have went for a PS3 or Xbox 360. Especially since the best “family” games (for our family) would have been the Guitar Hero/Rock Band/Karaoke style stuff and the lack of downloadable content for them on the Wii, compared to the wealth of stuff for the other systems, is total and complete ass. A major disappointment.
I blame myself for buying into the hype and trying to go with what was the big thing at the time.
There’s a game called Mad World that’s coming out for the Wii in the future that is a more “mature” game, so to speak. To get an idea, here’s the trailer, but be warned it’s definitely NSFW. Lots of blood.
I’m also looking forward to the new Kid Icarus, new Kirby, and possibly the new Star Fox. There are also rumors of Animal Crossing Wii and Pikmin 3, two series that I never got into but I think I might try out.
I’m pretty happy with my Wii right now. I just recently got a used copy of Metroid Prime 3 to add to my collection (and only $25! Sweet!). The thing is, if I had a 360 or a PS3 it would probably be collecting more dust than my Wii would. Off the top of my head, the only games out for PS3 that I want are GTA IV, Ratchet and Clank: Future, and MGS4. There’s lots more coming out in the future that will eventually lead me to buying it, but besides those three games I have no interest in a PS3 for now. As for 360, the only games I want for that are Bioshock, Mass Effect, and Dead Rising. Compare that to the amount of Wii games I own already (Super Mario Galaxy, SSBB, Mario Kart Wii, Fire Emblem, Zack & Wiki, Mario Party 8, Super Paper Mario, and the afore-mentioned Metroid Prime 3) and there’s still stuff out that I want to purchase (Twilight Princess, Boom Blox, No More Heroes) there’s almost triple the amount of material. Add in the WiiWare + Virtual Console and I’m set.
Personally, I think it’s just preference at this point. People who like the Wii and its games can argue up, down, left, and right about how good the games are for it, but if there’s more games that interest you on the 360 or PS3, then the Wii isn’t the system for you.
The reason I never bought a Gamecube was because I felt as though Nintendo burned me with the N64. There were a handful of excellent games for the N64 including Zelda, Mario, and a few others but overall there just weren’t that many great games. So instead I purchased a Playstation 2 and own a heck of a lot more games for that system than I ever did for my N64. Of course My PS2 is about 8 years old now so maybe that has a little something to do with the amount of games I own.
I think the Wii is a really good system. Twilight Princess and Super Mario Galaxy were a lot of fun and I’m looking forward to No More Heroes, Jedi Unleashed (or whatever it’s called), and a few others I’ve heard about. I just don’t understand why some third party groups have no desire to support the Wii. Harmonix’s half assed efforts to bring Rock Band to the Wii really confuses me.
Is it possible that Nintendo is simply a more difficult company to deal with than Sony or Microsoft? I don’t know the ins and outs of producing video games so I can’t help but think that they have a logical reason for not including downloadable content with Rock Band or even a custom character generator.
Nintendo used to be but my understanding is that those days are ten years gone. The post-N64 management shake up changed things for the better. Sony has the reputation at this point for being impossible to work with and I’ve never heard a bad word said about Microsoft’s XBox development practices.
