With Super Mario Galaxy 2 still visible in our rear-view, Metroid: Other M still fresh in people's Wiis, and Zelda: Skyward Sword coming up soon, I felt it appropriate to talk a little bit about Nintendo, their games, and the success they've been enjoying as of late.
And how it doesn't make any sense.
This may seem like a silly thing to say, with Nintendo being a huge (if not the biggest) name in video games, featuring their own in-house triple-A titles with arguably the longest running continuous history today. Mario is a more recognizable character to children than Abraham Lincoln is (that's a FACT, folks), and chances are, either your mom, your girlfriend, or maybe even both have played a Nintendo game at some point in their lives. So why then do I find it odd that they are currently enjoying the success that they are? Bear with me for a bit...
I guess a good starting point would be Nintendo's hardware itself. The Wii is a funny little machine that families everywhere love and gamers like me love to hate. Don't get me wrong, when I heard about it way back in 2006, I thought it was an awesome idea. I can specifically remember watching the tech demo for Twilight Princess at E3 thinking "this is going to rock." The issue is that Nintendo chose to focus on crazy tricked-out motion controls and "Wii-motes" at the expense of processing power and, you know, an actual system. The Wii is a little white box with last-gen graphics that can't even play DVD's (just for comparison, the PS3 comes with a built in BLU-RAY player). But I was never really a "graphics make the game" kind of guy, so I was willing to overlook this because - come on - freaking motion controls man. We'd never seen that before (yes I'm purposely omitting mention of the Power Glove).
The problem came in the execution. Nintendo did such a bad job of implementing the Wii's unique features into games in a way that really showcased what the system was capable of. Maybe the launch of Red Steel and its almost instantaneous bellyflop scared most developers (Nintendo included) away from the motion controls on the Wii, or maybe it just NEVER worked the way it was supposed to, but whatever the reason, there quickly arose two very distinct categories of Wii games: the games featuring motion and pointer control were the "pick up and play" party games like Cooking Mama and Mario Party, and the "hardcore" games (dare I say the REAL games) were relegated to the realm of simple Nunchuk + buttons control, occasionally with a waggle here or there substituting for a button press on a conventional controller.
This brings me to another major problem that the Wii faces. Nintendo is marketing their console to two very different crowds: the casual, "on the couch together as a family" crowd who have likely never played video games before in their lives (in fact I know people who had never played video games before who bought a Wii), and on the other end of the spectrum, the "hardcore" gamer who had been with Nintendo for 20 years. The "cashies" would love it because a Wii remote was simple and intuitive and didn't involve learning your way around a scary foreign object like a video game controller, and the hardcore crowd would love it because the new tech offered increased precision and an exciting new immersive way to play your favorite games. Except as I explained earlier, it didn't quite work out this way; the motion control was never tapped to its full potential, so the "party games" featured overly-simplified repetitive motions that quickly became unfun (except these people had never played video games before so they didn't even realize that they weren't having fun), and the triple-A titles nixed it completely so there WAS no new immersive gameplay - it was the same old analog stick and buttons, on a system with graphics that were only marginally improved from last gen.
Another shortcoming of the Wii's hardware is its criminally inadequate online system. I'm wary of beginning a rant that will take me so far off topic I'll forget what day it is, but suffice to say, gaming today IS an online medium. It's just the reality of the situation. And it seems to be a reality that Nintendo refuses to accept. Both Xbox360 and PS3 have online systems seamlessly integrated into their dashboards. They are effectively built around their online community, with an emphasis on maintaining your online profile, playing publicly with other people, and meeting maintaining groups of friends with whom you can play with at your leisure. To call the Wii's online system clunky by comparison would be to pay it an undue compliment. Nintendo has forsaken customizable, tradeable gamertags for random, 16-digit numbers that you are assigned when you plug in your console. Even if someone did take the effort to memorize their "friend code", you can't GIVE it to anyone since there is no way to communicate with anyone in-game, and you can only send messages to people who's code you already have. You can't even just punch in a random code and get a friend that way, since both parties have to add the other person's friend code in order for there to be any sort of communication between the two. In other words, unless you already know (and can talk to!) the person outside of Wii-world, you can't play with them online. I know that Nintendo had children (and more specifically web-paranoid parents) and their safety and anonymity in mind when they designed this system, but it seems so counter-intuitive to the notion of community that online gaming is striving for these days. I have met people over Xbox Live with whom I still maintain contact years later, and through these people met some of their online friends, and in this way I've met a bunch of really cool guys that I enjoy not only playing with, but just talking to in online parties. With my Wii, my online gaming is restricted to myself and local friends who give me their codes ahead of time. But as it turns out, with no live chat option, we always just end up logging on to Xbox Live to play anyways.
Thus Nintendo seemed to succeed at the very odd task of increasing their fanbase tenfold while simultaneously shafting the people who had been supporting them for the past two decades. Oddly enough, however, on paper the Wii has done everything right - it was the top selling system by far. In fact, as recently as July of this year (yes, that's almost 4 years after its release), the Wii was STILL the top selling current-gen home console, selling almost as much as the Xbox 360 and the PS3 COMBINED.
It seems that this rant has, despite my best efforts, run away from me and gotten out of hand. I'll wrap up my discussion in my next post, Part 2, where I'll talk about how Nintendo's management of their games makes absolutely no sense to me whatsoever. Until then
