|
Formerly a safe bet that any gamer could agree on, Nintendo has become a polarizing force in the gaming community with its upcoming "new generation" system, the Nintendo Wii. Certainly there are many people chomping at the bit to get their hands on Nintendo's upcoming home console. However, many other gamers are concerned that Nintendo, in trying to cater to non-gamers, is perhaps missing the mark.
First off, let's clear the air. I do not hate the Wii. I do not hate Nintendo. In fact, Nintendo is to be commended as being the only one of the big three that isn't preoccupied with the 25-34 male demographic to the point of forgetting to bring new people into the market. However, I am disturbed by the lack of criticism by anyone other than 1up's Luke Smith and Garnett Lee. The unanimity of media voices, as well as the willingness to gloss over any concerns that gamers may have, is disturbing. Nothing is unanimously loved in the world, at least not without outside incentive.
Now if anyone is going to understand the place Nintendo has in gamers' hearts, it's me. I grew up with Nintendo just the same as many of the people reading this. However, I'm not so willing to give them the free pass, not without legitimate dialog on the system. The potential is certainly amazing: being able to directly manipulate an in-game world has undeniable appeal. However, that's not what we're seeing, at least not so far. Let's look at what they've been showing us of late.
First, we have The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, a GameCube port which is being released first on the Wii because Nintendo is launching their second home console in a row without a Mario game (Galaxy isn't coming out until 2007). While the TGS demonstrations are certainly much improved over what was shown at E3, it's still apparent that Miyamoto and friends intended for this game to be played on the Cube. You flick your wrist to swing Link's sword, but the force of your swing is completely irrelevant to Link's swing. In other words, gestures are simply taking the place of much more convenient button presses. We're going to be seeing this over and over again throughout the console's life, and it's going to hurt otherwise phenomenal games.
Next, we have Wii Sports, the pack-in tech demo-er, game. This is exactly what Nintendo needs to avoid at all costs. Instead of having a cohesive game, what we're presented with in Wii Sports is a collection of mini games that have little appeal beyond the occasional drinking game with buddies, which is made hard to put together because the controllers are so damned expensive. It's a tennis racquet! Boxing gloves! A bowling ball! Why is Nintendo wasting everyone's time with half-baked sports titles? I don't know about anyone else, but I would have much rather had a single sport that took full advantage of the controller's potential. Imagine if you will a game where, instead of simply swinging the racket after your avatar automatically goes to the ball, you had to move there yourself and put yourself in position for a swing, and actually having the type of swing you deliver affect how the ball behaves. Imagine a Punch-Out game where you have full freedom of movement inside the ring, ducking and weaving at will, with a wide variety of punches at your disposal, able to do varying damage based on the force of your punching and the position in which the shots land. Instead of this ridiculous mish-mash of mini games, Nintendo should have just taken one sport and tweaked the hell out of it. Of course, this level of actual immersion may just be impossible with the Wii controller, which is the very problem Nintendo's going to be facing if they want to do anything other than cute distractions.
On first blush, Metroid Prime 3: Corruption seems to get it right. You're actually turning keys and touching panels and yanking shields off enemies, and generally getting involved in the environment. However, the limitations of the controller once again come up. Much like UbiSoft's Red Steel, your head movement is controlled by the position of the cursor rather than a dedicated input device. While TGS showed attempts to tweak the movement controls so players didn't have to move the cursor all the way to the edge of the screen in order to move Samus' head around, this is still slower than using a mouse or an extra thumb stick, and introduces several new problems. What exactly are you supposed to do if you're surrounded and it takes several seconds to survey the group of enemies facing you? What if movement is triggered while trying to aim at an enemy in the corner? The inclusion of auto-lock simply validates concerns over this control scheme. The Wii's looking like it's not going to be much of a system for first-person shooting.
Now that we've talked about how new games are using the Wii controller, let's talk about some of the wonderful new features that are being thrown into the console to justify the atrocious gouging Nintendo is doing. First off, the weather and news updates. Great features, to be sure. But would anyone buy a console for that? Is anyone going to go to their local Wal-Mart and breathlessly say "this thing can keep me up-to-date on news and weather! Here's my $250!"? I doubt it. Next, we have the Miis. Certainly cute, but do they serve any function otherwise? We know Nintendo's going to use the annoying friend code system for Wii online play (thus completely invalidating Wii online play), so the Miis aren't going to be used in a fashion similar to an Xbox Live gamer card. The only function that seems to be served by the Miis are to be playable characters in Wii Sports and to run around in a white space similar to that fly swatting mini game in Mario Paint. Of course, this conversation wouldn't be complete without talking about the much talked about Virtual Console. Am I the only person who doesn't give a damn? While the thought of TurboCD games on the Wii has its' appeal (Bring me Valis and Ys!), what else is going to be released that hasn't been released before on compilation discs a million times? And so far, only Nintendo, Sega and Hudson are talking about bringing games to the service. This leaves out many third party greats. The Turoks, Forgotten Worlds, and Crono Triggers look like they'll be absent, at least for now. It's going to be a cesspool of Mario, Sonic and Bomberman unless we see more third party support and quick. Also, why exactly are we so excited about old games? Isn't the Wii supposed to be about new experiences? When the biggest deal to lots of people is the chance to play Super Mario 3 with their Wii points, Houston's got a problem.
Given the points outlined above, there's plenty of reason to be concerned about the Wii's future. That people are so willing to ignore these concerns is quite grating. To the Wii faithful, I say this: the burden of proof is on Nintendo, not on its detractors. I want to be wrong about the Wii more than anything. However, Nintendo has shown plenty to be critical about, and I'm not willing to turn a blind eye because I happen to like Mario.
|
RSS feed
iTunes