I don't think much about Nintendo in general. On some level, they as so ubiquitous it's like discussing the wetness of water. Yes, they do tend to just keep making Mario, Metroid, and Zelda games over and over, but that's where their money is, I guess. To fail to make such games would be like Def Leppard putting out a country album.
Any discussion of Nintendo these days just can't happen without talking about their latest console, the Wii. I'll be honest. The Wii is the first console I have been excited about since the Nintendo Entertainment System way back in 1986, over twenty years ago. The reason why is that there has been little by way of improvement in game consoles in the past two decades. Yes, there have been improved graphics and 3-D modeling and such. It's surprising how little that matters. Better graphics do not make for better games. I have had no interest in any of the last couple generations of game consoles. Although I do own a PS2, but it's used primarily as a DVD player. I see little reason to buy new game consoles because the experience is pretty much the same as the last generation consoles, which was the same as the generation before than, etc., etc., going back a good twenty years.
The Wii is different. As such, it's still hard to judge if this is a case of different is good, but when I'm visiting the family and I, my five-year old nephew, my mother, and grandmother are all playing Wii Sports Tennis and having a ball, something is working. I applaud that. Hardcore gamers don't seem to care for it, and that's fine. They have two, as Yahtzee put it, bricks with paddles attached with string consoles that deliver the familiar gaming experience they've come to expect and get sulky like a teen-aged girl who's grounded on prom night when they don't get it. The Wii is a console for the rest of us who find the difficulty curve on most games erects an insurmountable brick wall right on the first training mission.
So, I have respect for Nintendo for trying to reach to a wider, different audience than the usual gamer market. It was a gutsy move that could have easily failed as spectacularly as it appears to be succeeding, if the continued inability to meet the consumer demand for the bloody things is any indication of success. To my mind, this excuses their conservativeness in the games they make, i.e. Mario et al., as they had already made the bold move with the console itself.
