9 Out of 10 Zombies Prefer the Wii

As I noted last November, the Wii is the console of choice for zombie games. Now it will be getting yet another: Dead Rising.

After the ugly Lost Planet port and no Dead Rising for the PS3, I feel a bit burned by Capcom. On the other hand, I can now kill about a dozen zombie birds with one stone:

• Resident Evil 4
• Umbrella Chronicles
• House of the Dead 2 & 3
• Dead Rising
• My older son's undying desire to play Mario Kart, Smash Bros., and/or Super Mario Galaxy.

I guess I'll just start saving my pennies now and plan for a Wii this fall sometime.

Labels: capcom, nintendo, sega, wii, zombies

--jvm at 14:09

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Wii-nner, Wii-nner, Chicken Dii-nner!

Doing some trawling through GameRankings, I ran across this advertisement.Now the phrase "wii-nner, wii-nner, chicken dii-nner" won't stop repeating in my head. Argh.

I think I'll be able to do without the Wii for a while longer now...

Incidentally, links to this page.

Labels: adverts, nintendo, wii

--jvm at 21:16

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Super Smash Bros. Bawl

I went down to the local ConHugeCo GameStopPlaceStoreThing yesterday and picked up my copy of Super Smash Bros. Brawl, the latest alternative the game industry has presented us for boring, painful life. All the way back, my mind was swirling with the possibilities: how would the workings of fate conspire this time to dash my hopes? Would the disc turn out to be broken neatly in two halves when I open the case? Would there be a wacky mix-up, and the game inside would be Sonic Riders? Would my car get sideswiped on the way back, leaving my organs strewn across the pavement, and as consciousness surrenders to death, would my copy of Smash Bros. Brawl lay sprawled mere inches from my rapidly stiffening arms? Would the game suck? Turns out none of this happened. Instead, the damn thing just doesn't work!

But it's just my Wii the game fails to work in. It works in my cousin's son's perfectly well, and at his place I was at least able to play the game for a couple of hours (under the disapproving glare of one of the visiting obnoxious local kids with which our street is cursed, they roam the road in packs). But whenever I tried to play it in my own Wii, the system would continually pop up one of those hateful "Disc is unreadable" errors, which Wiis present whether the disc's data is entirely opaque to the drive, or if even one byte of data is unreadable, drawing the whimsical ire of the Lockout Fairies.

Nintendo, at least, knows of the problem, and has a mechanism in place to handle repairs, and to their credit they provide free shipping and repair for affected systems. What they say is that, since the game is on a dual layer DVD, some systems whose lenses have gotten a bit dirty will fail to recognize the disc. This seems a little suspicious to me, since never before has a game disk failed to read in my Wii. In fact, it strikes me as more likely the result of a manufacturing flaw, whether one that directly makes dual layer discs unreadable, or maybe one that allows grime to get on the lens in the first place. Anyway, either way, the game still don't work.

And they considered the possibility that I might somehow enjoy the game on my cousin's son's Wii while mine is being fixed, because they want me to send my copy of Smash Bros. Brawl along with the system too.

Labels: nintendo, repair, smashbrosbrawl, wii

--JohnH at 07:45

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Zomb-wii

The Wii is gradually building up a list of games that interest me. Regrettably, they're all zombie games:

• Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition


• Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles


• House of the Dead 2 & 3

I'm tepid on Metroid Prime 3, mostly because the first one put me to sleep every time I tried to play it, but will still give it a run when I get a Wii. Even so, give the Wii another year and another three zombie games, and I'll buy one on that basis alone.

Labels: nintendo, wii, zombies

--jvm at 23:20

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The Wii nine months later, good and bad

Things I'm disappointed with concerning my Wii:

• Here we are approaching a year since the Wii's release, and so far Wii Sports remains the only game to use the message board, and only three games use Miis. This is a tremendous opportunity that's being wasted. Hearing about the problems EA had in getting access to the Mii feature for My Sims was troubling. It's not every day that EA even decides to try something new, to reject them for the attempt borders on criminal.
  
• Staying on the topic, how amazing is it that even now, the Wii game I and my friends play the most remains Wii Sports? We started with bowling (and still play it sometimes), after that we moved on to baseball, golf, then tennis. The only game on the disk whose charm has mostly eluded us is boxing, yet it's possible to see us playing even that.
  
• While I'm not as annoyed with "waggle" as some bloggers, it remains a fact that tacked-on remote functionality is a big problem. There is no reason that remote-swishing should block laser blasts in Lego Star Wars for the Wii, which isn't exactly a first-person game and was good enough as it was.
  
• Although their system is more than capable over the internet (and they have, by far, the best web browser among the consoles), Microsoft still easily beats them in online features, and with Nintendo's downloadable games effort still shrouded in scaffolding the 360 has a huge lead over them in new software. Settlers of Catan and Championship Pac-Man are almost enough to make me consider getting a 360 by themselves and are available now, but we're barely even sure what Nintendo's got lined up yet. So far we only have two channels available for download that didn't have placeholders (or full channels) on the screen at launch, and one of them is just a fancy advertisement for Metroid Prime 3.
  

Positive things:

• I'm more excited over Super Mario Galaxy than I have been over any game for a long time. It's good to see the series return to form. Smash Bros. Brawl is interesting, but we've seen little to indicate that it's going to be very different from Melee. That may be understandable, since in the end Melee was the most popular Gamecube game, but it's not exactly visionary.
  
• What we've seen in the way of the channels Nintendo has produced have been, generally, well-made. While it was singled out for complaints right after its release, Everybody Votes has been my most-used non-game channel, since there's only so much room on the system for Miis, and for news and weather I generally turn to the internet and the window, respectively. One sometimes learns disturbing things there too: when the world-wide question asked users if they had dreams for the future, "yes" understandably far outweighed "no" in all nations except three: Germany, Austria and Japan, in which places the split approached 50/50. I'm surprised sociologists haven't yet pounced upon this data.
  
• The Gamecube had a number of excellent games made for it that got dismissed out of hand solely because of the system's third-place position in the market. The second Paper Mario deserved so much better than it got. It is nice to see that, despite their lacking performance at the time, Nintendo is perfectly happy making sequels to those games. Super Paper Mario may not ultimately be the same kind of game, but it's got the same sense of humor and the same brilliant writing. Seeing it break a million units sold is almost enough to make me think justice has returned to the world.
  
• Finally, the most awesome aspect of the recent firmware update wasn't the clock (by a long shot) but unannounced USB keyboard support. This makes for a big change from the usual Nintendo policy regarding hardware, namely, to make users buy highly-profitable first-party accessories whenever possible. Here's hoping that the Internet Channel gets patched for keyboards soon, and that Nintendo realizes USB drives are a lot more convenient as a backup solution than SD cards.

Labels: nintendo, wii

--JohnH at 22:55

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VC Curmudgeon: Battle Lode Runner, Castlevania, Ninja Gaiden

Note: the rating system has changed. As Mordrak suggested last time, more curmudgeon-heads should imply a worse game. Five heads means awful, none means great.

Also note: I'm dispensing with the rate-the-most-recent format. I'll just offer a dip into the VC archives each time, as personal knowledge and/or interest merits.

Battle Lode Runner
Produced and released by Hudson. Originally for the PC Engine.
Rating:

Lode Runner, Broderbund's ancient action-puzzle platformer, has a long and storied history. One of the first real hits of the 8-bit computer age, with ports for most contemporary systems, it featured 150 levels, an editor, and a whole lot of hurt. This is an incredibly difficult game, and it requires complete mastery of the game world's physics and enemy AI to finish it.

Broderbund only released the original computer versions of the game, but licensors in Japan kept the the series going for much longer, up to the N64/PSX era. Battle Lode Runner comes from that branch of the series. All editions are brutally hard puzzle games, and this one assumes players have some past experience, so it gets taxing for newcomers in the first ten levels (of 101), and hard for experienced players within the first 40. You will be stumped frequently, but genuine puzzle game fans wouldn't have it any other way. (Others are directed to GameFAQs, which has an obtuse, but excellent, resource on the game.)

Battle Lode Runner's main attraction is supposed to be its battle mode, which indeed is cool and takes inspiration from Bomberman, right down to offering cameos by the Black Bomber, but for true classic gaming fans puzzle mode is the real draw here... if they can put up with the soul-crushing difficulty and extreme trickiness. For professionals only.

Castlevania
Produced and released by Konami. Originally for the NES.
Rating:
As Curmudgeon Gamer readers probably can remember, some of us have considerable fondness for the Castlevania games. While I enjoy most of them, if I had to choose my taste would lean more towards the old-school, level-based platformers more than the recent "Metroidvanias." Of them all, my favorite remains this one, the original Castlevania, a game that has been much cursed and loved over the years since its release.

Lots of people dump on Castlevania now. They react with dismay that you can't change your jump direction in midair, how enemies frequently kill you with one knock into a bottomless pit, how you can be screwed over instantly just by picking up the wrong subweapon. I even agree with them on that last bit; I've lost Holy Water too many times because a random monster decided to drop a Dagger on the pixel just in front of me.

But for those who watch for these things, there is a kind of perfection here. Simon Belmont has a peculiar mixture of weakness and strength. His basic attack has a nice, long range, but terrible vertical reach. In order to attack airborne foes or candles, the player must learn the timing to jump and whip just after launching, so the strike comes at the top of the jump.

Once that move is mastered, the game's addictive rhythm begins to be felt, and the player starts noticing that the enemies have their own rhythms. Medusa heads come flying out in a sine wave at regular intervals. Skeleton throwers release their projectiles on a set schedule. Bone pillars fire fireballs over a three-second count. This combines with Simon's steady pace to produce a game with a definite flow, and once you get into it (which can take a while), it's possible to finish whole levels without taking a hit.

But that's when you get into it, and until then, you will die, die, die. Most bosses can be defeated absurdly easily if you get to them with the Holy Water weapon, but if you lack it then the odds are against you, even if you're at full health. Castlevania will probably come as a rude shock to players used to the likes of Aria of Sorrow and Symphony of the Night, but it shows admirably the difficulty and production values that make NES-era Konami so adored by retro gamers.

A note about the game: I actually own the NES Classics rerelease of this game in addition to the recent VC game, and I noticed that the ROMs used in the two are not identical, either with each other or the original NES game! There is a scoring bug in the NES version for when players defeat five or more enemies with one subweapon that can be used to reap many thousands of points, and multiple extra lives on the first level. It has been fixed in both later releases. Further, the Virtual Console keeps the original game's joke credits (all the monsters are played by actors with punny names), but the GBA release sloppily removes them. These are interesting edit decisions, indeed....

Ninja Gaiden
Produced and released by Tecmo. Originally for the NES.
Rating:

In a way Ninja Gaiden it is a spiritual brother to Castlevania, featuring similarly limited weapons, a nearly identical subweapon system, an obvious analogue to CV's heart weapon-use system, and copious background objects to be destroyed for items. Like Castlevania, there is a subweapon (the buzzsaw-like spin move) that can make short work of bosses, but isn't well-suited to non-boss use. Yet Ninja Gaiden isn't nearly as fun.

Back in the day, everyone loved Ninja Gaiden. It transformed a company known for quirky puzzle-like games (like the awesome Solomon's Key) to the talk of the playground. Ninja Gaiden was maybe not the first game to give us cinema scenes, but it was the first to do it with panache. I like to imagine that the developers, noticing that many anime productions are composed with a relatively small number of flat animation frames, realized that the technique was perfectly suited to the NES' graphics hardware.

But the game hasn't aged well. Castlevania's weighty, striding protagonist keeps the flow of that game reasonable and provides it with a pace, but Ninja Gaiden's Ryu streaks across the scene and gets knocked around almost before the player can react. And the game doesn't keep track of which foes you killed in an area, so if you scroll past a location where you killed a foe and return to it, he will have returned. And while Ryu can be controlled in mid-air, this doesn't apply if an enemy hits him, so pits here are nearly as bad as Castlevania's. Add in a wall jump with twitchy timing, annoying jumping puzzles, and a primary weapon with way too short a reach relative to enemy speed, and most players will get frustrated fast.

This isn't to say that Castlevanis isn't frustrating too. But that game rarely gives you the feeling like you have had no time to react, while Ninja Gaiden gives this impression constantly, and its constant stream of reappearing, tiny foes with two-step walk animations stand in contrast with the slick cutscene graphics.

It is possible to like Ninja Gaiden. We all did once. But we also once liked the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, G.I. Joe, and Transformers. Despite what Michael Bay seems to think, it seems that childhood fondness can only take you so far.

EDIT: Title changed to something slightly more appropriate.

Labels: battleloderunner, classic, loderunner, nes, pcengine, retro, tg16, vc, virtual console, wii

--JohnH at 21:19

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Above link goes to the page on Google's official blog discussing it. Short story shorter, one of the Google Reader team has a Wii and thought an interface would be cool/awesome, and so, he and his team made one over a weekend.

I like to think, when they went over the browser strings in their logs, their noticing the Wii Opera traces left by my attempts to use their service on my Wii played a role in their decision.

But why should Wii have all the fun? Get cracking on PSP support Google! And I surely need to check Curmudgeon Gamer and Lifehacker through Dreamcast PlanetWeb while we're at it!

Work on a Lynx interface, unfortunately, is still not forthcoming.

Labels: google, googlereader, nifty, rss, wii

--JohnH at 13:58

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Virtual Console Adventures: The MK64 Bug

One of the things my local circle of gaming friends and I love is Mario Kart 64.

For my money SNES Mario Kart is a little better, but it's limited to two players. For multiplayer Mario Kart action, nothing matches the N64 version. Its battle mode provides a level of strategy unseen in what has become, in later installments of the series, a throwaway mode. Its race mode is also fairly awesome, despite some worrying design choices. It is a game that has kept us occupied for over a decade.

Last night, we were playing a few Mario Kart rounds on the Wii's Virtual Console, and we encountered a surprising flaw in the emulation. In one race on Moo Moo Farm, the game played at an obviously much higher speed than normal. I'm not talking about it just seeming faster through the Wii's increased framerate, it actually was a much faster race. The starting lights, instead of the measured "one... two... three", went by in less than a second, and during the race our velocities were likewise increased.

It was entertaining to play, once, but it wasn't accurate. We were lucky we were on Moo Moo Farm, a fairly laid-back course, and not, for example, Bowser's track. If we had been in a Grand Prix, a "real" game instead of a quick race, the playthrough would likely have been ruined.

Interestingly, the music and sound effects were not accelerated. One of us used a Star powerup during the game, and the invincibility music only had enough time to loop twice before the effect ran out. The next race, speeds returned to normal, and remained there until we stopped for the night.

We're not sure what circumstances triggered the speed-up. The story is that some people who have purchased Mario Kart 64 were later offered a mysterious update for it in the Wii Shop Channel. Nintendo is notoriously tight-lipped about what goes into these updates, and I hear that sometimes, like with Star Fox 64, they actually seem more like downgrades, rolling back some of Virtual Console's already-meager framerate improvements. If SF64 runs off the same emulator it is not unreasonable to assume that it will also suffer from speed spikes once in a while.

I'll probably check online for an update to see if it addresses the problem, but will it? It occurs so infrequently that we'll really never know if the flaw has been fixed or not unless it happens again. Nintendo has taken pains to keep the mechanics of Virtual Console hidden from the player, ostensibly for usability's sake, but there is a limit to what can be explained away in the name of simplicity, and it seems in this case that Nintendo is more trying to hide the details of Virtual Console's flaws by not talking about them.

But that is really a crappy way to treat one's customers. We deserve to know what the benefits and drawbacks to updating are before pressing the fatal button. C'mon Nintendo, give us some credit here.

Labels: bugs, classic, emulation, mariokart, mariokart64, nintendo, pr, virtual console, wii

--JohnH at 10:57

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Virtual Console Curmudgeon: Starfox 64, TMNT, Dragon's Curse

I usually end up reviewing new Virtual Console releases on whatever random website I read about them first, so I figured I'd just go ahead and start discussing them here, in a suitably curmudgeony style if the game merits it. Which is to say, often.

Starfox 64
Released by Nintendo. Originally for the Nintendo 64.
Rating:

Notable differences: Likely does not support controller rumble. Ordinarily this would be a minor point, except, if you'll think back, you'll remember that Starfox 64 was the original "Rumble Pak" game. Its exclusion seems very odd because of that, although not as bad as Ocarina of Time, in which arguably rumble is an important feature.

Hard to believe there's only really been two "real" StarFox games, isn't it? This is the second of the two, also only the second Starfox game ever, so it seems strange that they rebooted the story right off.

For an on-rails shooter, this is about as cool as you can get. While not as controller-smashing difficult as the original (which I never did finish on its hardest route) it is quite challenging, there is a nice variety of areas to visit, as well as secret missions to complete, branching paths to explore, hidden warp levels to find, "all range" areas where you can fly freely, dogfights with enemy fighters, a tank level and an underwater level, and a blisteringly-difficult gold medal to earn in each and every stage. And once you've done it all: Expert Mode! Argh! (I know all this because I've done all those things. Yeah, I be bad at N64 Starfox. I challenge you guys to beat my high score BTW, just shy of 1,800 points.)

For all these reasons, Starfox 64 is arguably the high point in the series. The SNES game was challenging but looks primitive now, and its framerate is difficult to put up with now. The less said about the first Gamecube game the better, and both Armada (GC) and Assault (DS) mix up the formula too much to seem really Starfoxy.

A great moment from the N64 game: Played properly, you can get an instant win against the boss on the tank level, worth an absurd point bonus. Once done the first time, it never feels "right" beating the boss the normal way again.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Released by Konami. Originally for the NES.
Rating:

It's back in the news for two reasons. First, there seems to be a movie floating around somewhere about its title characters. Second, it was the focus of an unusually rancorous Angry Nintendo Nerd video where he soundly trashed the game.

Folks, I'm hear to tell you he's 100% correct. For all his hyperbole and (probably facetious) posturing, the Nerd usually knows his games. The game has a lot of features, is very long, and a very very high level of challenge, but ultimately it's just not worth it. The turtles jump like they're underwater, the actual underwater level is frustrating beyond the realm of mere obnoxiousness, and if Donatello buys the farm, good luck getting anywhere else in the game.
But for the record I have beaten this one. I will save you all the trouble of fighting through these six levels of young, genetically-flawed, amphibious Eastern hell by spoiling the ending: Turtlephile April O'Neil, in a text box, offers to take the shelled warriors out for pizza. Ho! Ha! Ho!

But, if you do want to smash your head against something unforgivably unyielding, the game is here for you. I did beat it once upon a time, so there must be something there. If you happen to be an obsessive-compulsive, socially awkward teenager like I was, maybe you can find whatever it was that compelled me to finish it. If you are not, please, please, pass.

Dragon's Curse
Released by NEC (probably developed by Hudson Soft). Originally for the Turbo-Grafx 16.
Rating (provisional):

Notable differences: The Wii's reputedly-inaccurate TG-16 sound emulation would apply to this game.

Being a TG16 game, I didn't get the chance to try this at all when it came out. The lore around the game is that it's actually a port of a later sequel to Wonder Boy, a game of which the licensing issues surrounding it are the stuff of fanboy legend. (For more on the games, and the issues check out the excellent Hardcore Gaming 101 article.) Suffice to say the game is extremely similar, as in containing the same levels, to the Genesis game Wonder Boy in Monster Land. Similar enough that, if you've played one, apparently you need not play the other.

But oddly, it doesn't turn out to be a bad game, at least from a first-gen Genesis perspective.
You can see that Metroid's lessons were learned well, although they take rather a different form than usual. In Metroid games, you explore and beat bosses to find powerups, which you then use to explore new areas. In Dragon's Curse, when you beat a boss you get turned into a new form with an entirely different set of movement options, advantages and disadvantages as before. So it seems that you actually lose the ability to go to some places as you proceed (if I undertand correctly), which may make it important to search a well as you can for secret stuff before fighting bosses.

I'm finding it to be an interesting, inoffensive game, with simple graphics but decent challenge. It's not really non-linear, since while technically you can go wherever you can, that is arranged, your characters exploration ability, like in Metroid games, is strictly limited to stop you from going where you're not supposed to be. Since this is the TG16 version, it costs only $6 to get, instead of $8 as the Genesis version would, and that may be a better deal.

According to the Hardcore Gaming 101 article linked-to above, this game actually pulls off a Symphony of the Night at the start: the first level of this game is the last level of the previous game, with a character so powerful that he has no real chance of losing. Nice to see where that little idea got its start.

EDIT: Fixed formatting, added whitespace. (Also, last night I fixed the ANN link.)

Labels: classic, dragonscurse, ninjaturtles, retro, starfox, starfox64, tmnt, virtual console, wii

--JohnH at 02:57

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Exclusives for the new generation

Platform exclusive features will be the replacement for platform exclusive games. The latest case is Spider-Man 3 for the PlayStation 3 which will have a special New Goblin mini-game.

We saw the beginnings of this trend last generation: Splinter Cell (exclusives map on PS2, GBA connection on GameCube), Soul Calibur II (platform-exclusive characters), and Prince of Persia: Sands of Time (original Prince of Persia emulated on the PlayStation 2, the sequel Prince of Persia 2 on the Xbox). It will only get worse this generation.

It used to be that you could buy all three platforms and the exclusive games for each. Now, to get access to everything you not only need all three platforms but also all three versions of a particular game. Lovely.

And, yes, I did buy both versions of Pinball Hall of Fame, one for my PlayStation 2 and one for my PSP.

Labels: business, gamecube, ps2, ps3, wii, xbox, xbox360

--jvm at 21:28

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Time to bring Star Wars: The Arcade Game to the Wii

If I understand correctly, the Wii controller can detect rotational motion. Perhaps that makes it the perfect console for a port of Star Wars: The Arcade Game. Each previous port, along with the disappointing official emulation on the GameCube, suffered from inadequate approximation of the original game's control yoke.I'm guessing the PS3's SIXAXIS controller might be capable of doing something similar, but since Nintendo has traditionally gotten these types of Star Wars games, I figure it's the obvious candidate.

Labels: wii

--jvm at 21:34

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A new generation of fear mongering

From NPR's Morning Edition, we get this nugget from Kelly McBride:

The Wii is to physical fitness what grade inflation is to academic achievement.

The idea, of course, is that kids will not want to get out and play real sports when they can excel at virtual sports. As an example, McBride's son is impressed with his A+B button power serve. Not that this is new -- my dad kicked me out of my room more than once telling me to get outdoors and stop clacking away on my Commodore 64 -- but Wii Sports adds something new to the mix: virtual exercise.

Murder simulators? Those are so 2004. Exercise simulators are the future. Jack Thompson, call your office.

Labels: media, wii

--jvm at 08:30

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Why Manhunt 2 may not appear on PS3 and Xbox 360

Today Rockstar announced that Manhunt 2, sequel to the sadistic original game from 2003, will be published for the PlayStation 2, Sony PSP, and Nintendo Wii. While I am dismayed that another sadistic piece of garbage will be published, the choice of platforms is very interesting. If Rockstar were to simply port the version from the PlayStation 2 to the more powerful Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, they would be skewered for the lazy effort. They may avoid a full version of Manhunt 2 for those newer platforms, one that takes full advantage of the next generation hardware, because the end result would tread a little too close to real not just for the likes of Jack Thompson or even the ESRB but for the general public.

The passing generation of console hardware can do some amazing things. One has merely to look at Halo 2 and God of War 2 to see what the hardware can accomplish in capable hands. Yet those games fall measurably short of photorealistic. Most average people can still tell that the images on the screen aren't real.

For the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, however, the gap has narrowed. Moreover, this is Rockstar, creators of Table Tennis for the Xbox 360, a game lauded for its realism. On these newer platforms, the expectation of photorealism -- or some close approximation -- will be intense. Were Rockstar to make a photorealistic Manhunt, they'd need to show all the gore that had previously been chunky and blurry in the lower polygon, muddy textured PlayStation 2 game.

Manhunt is the kind of game that celebrates the image of a man's vain attempt to stuff his entrails back into his lacerated gut. No doubt there is a segment of the market that not only wants to see such sights, but in fact to cause them to happen. But the segment that stomached low resolution approximations of that scene on a PlayStation 2 is probably a good bit larger than the segment that wants to see a high resolution version, complete with pulsing, steaming, veiny intestines.

And Rockstar aren't alone in avoiding the bleeding edge of graphics. One of the most savvy moves I saw in the market last year was Valve's re-invention of Team Fortress. Imagine applying today's graphics to this original vision of TF2:
You would not come up with the form of TF2 that Valve has settled on:

So Rockstar has chosen to hit the platforms on which it can get away with this kind of game without crossing a virtual boundary. Beyond that boundary lies a whole new reality, the likes of which we have only begun to understand. I don't begrudge Rockstar's decision to avoid applying the full power of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 to the kind of game that would force us to ask some uncomfortable questions. I wish them luck and I'll be watching as always, an interested observer. However, the questions are still there: How real is too real? Which virtual activity will we, as a society, be willing to tolerate?

Labels: ps2, ps3, psp, violence, wii, xbox, xbox360

--jvm at 18:53

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Wii expands the GameCube market? Feh.

Mike pointed me to an article I missed in Thursday's updates to Next-Gen.biz: O3 Still Loving GameCube. It brings up an angle on backward compatibility that I don't recall being raised back when we last discussed its importance: it expands the base of the older platform, and therefore opens possibilities for smaller publishers to make some money.

O3 is bringing a Japanese shooter on the GameCube called Radio Allergy and depending on the Wii to expand the potential audience. That's a neat theory, but I don't think I really believe Wii players will be browsing the GameCube section of their stores enough to pick up cheap games. Sure, I know that I will do precisely that, but one thing the commenters on this blog have made painfully clear is that my habits are often widely divergent from the typical consumer habits. I suspect this is one of those cases.

We have a precedent, of course: the PlayStation 2 transition period. There we had nearly perfect backward compatibility and a successful system leading into yet another successful system. However, the kind of games that smaller publishers brought out were often quite poor. In O3's defense, I have no idea whether their game will be brilliant or ridiculously bad.

I hate to pick on Mud Duck Productions, since they at least have a nifty name, but their post-PS2 output for the PSOne is typical of what I expect will happen to publishers who look to the GameCube and Wii as one platform: cheap, one-off games like Qix Neo and Puzznic that sell for $10 and languish on shelves for years. (I think their pre-PS2 game Gubble falls into the same category, but I digress.) I just don't see Wii players jumping at the chance to own similar quality GameCube games.

There might actually be a profit in such ventures, especially if the production values are low enough and the number of gullible buyers is high enough*, but this isn't some sort of GameCube renaissance waiting to happen. The next time you see a really great game on a GameCube, it will probably be a homebrew title created by a fan somewhere around 2012.

* Yes, I own Qix Neo. I'm making my own library of games, for crying out loud, and that means getting everything, good and bad. I try not to pay too much for the dreck, naturally.

Labels: gamecube, nintendo, psone, wii

--jvm at 00:57

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Videogame gaffes and blunders of the year, director's cut

Next-gen.biz kindly asked me to reprise my curmudgeon role for an end-of-year post, and I obliged. The result has now been posted here.

To all who offered editorial comments on various topics this year -- Ruffin, John H., Michael, Dustin, and Kyle -- thanks for the help! Hopefully I remembered everyone.

Some bits ended up on the cutting room floor and I thought they'd be worth sharing. I should emphasize, perhaps, that everything past this point is mine, not Next-Gen.biz's, so if you want to yell at someone (or sue someone, if that's your thing), I'm your guy. In fact, if you just want to yell at someone, the comments are always open.

• The name - Originally I called the list "The 2006 Nelsons" after Nelson Muntz and his immortal "ha-ha" laugh. That got nixed (as I half-expected, but I held out hope until the end). My second choice was to award #1 the prestigious 2006 Foo Cup (say it out loud) and the others could be the 9 runners up. Apparently that didn't make it either. Gaffes and blunders it is!
  
  
• Linkification - The original version had well over fifty links (all internal to next-gen.biz, incidentally) which were changed to just standard text. I'd rather hoped they'd make it, because they provide the documentation for everything I wrote, and for the sake of business didn't go off-site. Ah well.
  
  
• The text went through several revisions. This bit about Nintendo never made it into any final drafts, but is pretty high on my list of flubs this year.
  

  Wii was region-free before it wasn't - What's worse than a region-locked console? Announcing a console is region-free and then correcting yourself to make it to region-locked. That's what Perrin Kaplan and Nintendo did to us with the Wii this year. I'm still angry about that one.
  

• The following was one of the entries, but got edited out. Along with this, I also considered putting in the big brouhaha over the Neverwinter Nights 2 review on 1UP and this bit by Simon Carless on how Xbox 360 sales were reported (poorly). Anyway, here's what got cut:
  

  Blogger Ethics Panel to Convene Soon - In September the popular videogame blog, Joystiq, posted about "a scoop for some important news with one of the next-generation consoles." Leaving details to the overactive imaginations of an army of commenters and forum fanboys, post author Robert Summa assured everyone that "this announcement is something worth waiting for." Was it a secret, unannounced feature of the Nintendo Wii? Was Microsoft going to announce that Halo 3 would be on shelves this holiday season? Maybe Sony would relent, drop the price, and put the PlayStation 3 within reach of upper middle class Americans with spotless credit ratings. Not to be left out, rival blog Kotaku's Brian Crecente posted about the upcoming announcement, saying "expect to hear some kinda interesting news about a very interesting upcoming console", but similarly gave away no details.
  
  What was that burning scoop? Here it is: "IBM announced that their Broadway chip custom-designed for Nintendo's Wii console has been shipping to Nintendo's since July."
  
  Oh, the humanity!
  
  Predictably, the firestorm sparked by this little stunt was ferocious. Robert Summa was summarily fired (yes, bloggers sometimes get paid) and Joystiq editor Chris Grant posted an apology. Summa shortly appeared on another site, Destructoid, and penned what amounted to a "f--k you" farewell to Joystiq, tastefully incorporating Martin Luther King Jr's famous "Free at last" speech and a picture of Mel Gibson in a battle skirt.
  
  And they wonder why we think the videogame press is less than professional sometimes...

• Hurricane Jack - When I wrote about Jack Thompson, I used the term Hurricane Jack to refer to him, since he hit the Gulf states of Louisiana and Florida. That term got nixed in the editing.
  
  
• Core Design and the Tomb Raider trailer - I wanted to include the mess surrounding the Tomb Raider PSP trailer that showed up this summer. I wrote a two long posts about: original post and the update. Unfortunately, one of the ground rules for the article was that I had to stick to facts, and unfortunately neither Core nor SCi/Eidos have provided a definitive version of just what did happen. We will probably never know exactly what it was, but you can at least read my take on it.
  
  
• Other ideas that didn't make the cut - Capcom's ongoing struggle to use larger fonts (in Dead Rising and Lost Planet), Nintendo DS absolutely destroying the PSP month after month, the coming rush of ridiculous MMOGs (Romero, Cartoon Network, James Cameron, and Dave Perry).
  

I'm sure there were other deserving screwups that I missed. Feel free to leave them in the comments.

Labels: microsoft, nintendo, ps3, sony, wii, xbox360

--jvm at 06:00

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Comment [ 8 ]

The real hidden cost of the Wii

Chatting with my brother this evening, he was griping that the Wii's remote strap is not the problem, as has been reported elsewhere, but rather the battery life. He's been using normal Duracell alkaline batteries and getting 15 hours of play out of them. For reference, Nintendo says you can get as much as 35 hours.

So let's do some calculation. Let's assume you play 10 to 25 hours a week, every week, for a year. You buy 20-packs of AA batteries from Wal-mart for $9.76 plus some tax, which we'll just call $10 for the sake of round numbers. You run your single Wii remote down until it's dead each time before replacing the batteries. The following table tells you how much you can expect to spend per year for batteries based on your usage (per week) and the lifespan of your batteries.

So if you're only getting 15 hours of use before you change the batteries, as apparently is happening with my brother, then you could spend $35 per year just on batteries by playing as little as 10 hours per week. If you play 20 hours a week, you're up near $70. And if you have two Wii remotes, the cost will go even higher.

Apparently the manual discourages the use of rechargeables, although the page linked above says use Nickel Metal Hydride (NiMH) if you insist on doing so. I don't know how long those will last, but my experience has been that regular batteries will last longer than rechargeables will between charges.

These are not huge costs, but they are costs you won't see with a PlayStation 3 or an Xbox 360 controller. Naturally, Nintendo will no doubt offer a new rechargeable Wii remote very soon, giving you the chance to upgrade. I bet it won't be cheap either.

Update: Brother sent me this scan from his manual, just to point out the bit that says you should use alkaline batteries...to avoid BATTERY LEAKAGE. Of course, who reads the manual (besides my brother)?

Labels: nintendo, wii

--jvm at 21:03

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Comment [ 5 ]

How Nintendo is solving its piracy problem

Given the rampant online piracy of Nintendo's games, should be no surprise that they have constructed significant roadblocks to prevent emulation of their last three systems: the GameCube, the Nintendo DS, and the Wii. While the GameCube used a proprietary medium, the Nintendo DS and Wii have much more effective deterrents: their unique interfaces.

The transition from the Atari 2600 joystick to the PlayStation analog pad (two sticks, D-pad, left and right shoulder triggers) not only focused the industry on a fairly standard interface but ensured that the previous generation's controls were mostly a subset of the next generation's. That progression also permitted emulation of earlier systems on newer systems with a minimum of fuss. If you want to emulate a SNES on an Xbox, the button mapping is natural. The Game Boy Advance could emulate NES games and the Nintendo DS can emulate the SNES, no mucking with buttons required. For years those same PlayStation-style pads have been available for home computers as well.

That process makes emulation both possible and attractive.

While emulation of games with nonstandard interfaces has been done before -- we have commercial emulations of the arcade games Paperboy and Star Wars: The Arcade Game and Marble Madness and 720 degrees -- the compromise made to fit a different controller is always unsatisfying.

And so, with the introduction of the Nintendo DS touchscreen and the Wii's spatial controller we see that Nintendo has made emulation piracy far less attractive, albeit still possible. Will we see people trading Wii games over the internet in 10 years as they do now with SNES ROMs? Perhaps, but it will probably mean that you will have to have a Wii controller -- or a knock off controller. Anything less will be unsatisfying. And in 10 years you can probably bet that Nintendo will offer a relatively cheap and easy alternative on their next system -- which will work with the Wii controller out-of-the-box and offer Wii games for download for a few dollars. With appropriately priced hardware and downloads, Nintendo will keep people in the Nintendo store and off the ROM sites.

The same could easily be true for the Nintendo DS. If the DS were the beginning of another cycle of incremental improvements roughly paralleling the progression from Game Boy to Game Boy Color to Game Boy Advance then we may not see another radical evolution of the Nintendo handheld line for another 15 years. Despite Nintendo's claims to the contrary, the DS appears to be its future for the handheld, not the Game Boy.

There will always be the hardcore folks who refuse to pay. They're a sad fact of life. Someone will hack drivers to make the Wii controller work on an emulator running under Windows or even on a GNU/Linux-enabled console. And certainly you can emulate a Nintendo DS with a mouse. I bet it isn't nearly as entertaining to play Elite Beat Agents by clicking a mouse, but that won't stop some people from doing it anyway.

However as appears to be happening with music, most people will choose to buy their games instead of pirate them if there are enough blocks to casual emulation piracy and a reasonably priced legitimate alternative. That's Nintendo's goal, and I think they've made the right moves to attain it.

Labels: legal, nintendo, wii

--jvm at 23:37

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Comment [ 8 ]

Virtual Console Stupidity

Go Nintendo reports on the games that will be made available at launch over Wii Virtual Console in different markets:

France, Denmark, Finland, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, Greece, Portugal, and Spain - Donkey Kong, Mario Bros., Wario's Woods, Bomberman 93, Super Star Soldier
Norway, Belgium, Austria, Ireland, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Norway, and Sweden - Donkey Kong, Mario Bros., Wario's Woods, Bomberman 93, Super Star Soldier, The Legend of Zelda, Dungeon Explorer, Victory Run

That's right, France and Britain will be getting five games on launch, while Luxemborg and Ireland will be getting eight -- including two, Dungeon Explorer and Victory Run, that are not yet available in the US, Nintendo's largest non-Japanese market. But that's nothing compared to the final sentence in the post:

Australia and New Zealand will not see TurboGrafx games, seeing that that platform never made it to those countries.

Nintendo has basically proven here that, to their mind, Virtual Console exists for nostalgia purposes only. Why would they not want to release TurboGrafx games in markets that never saw the system? Because, despite the fact that it costs almost nothing other than rights fees (which cannot be very high) and bandwidth to offer them, they will not, simply because they didn't get it the first time around. Each Virtual Console sale, especially at those prices, is almost pure profit for the licensor and Nintendo, to not chase it is ludicrous. Yeah, they gotta ESRB 'em, sure, so get it done and get them released!

Even worse, indeed incredibly bad, is that this also implies that the many Japanese-only games released over Virtual Console will remain Japanese-only.

To say that Nintendo is dropping the ball here seems like an understatement. If Nintendo were the only download gaming place in town then this kind of arrogance, which is fairly typical for the company it must be said (and this is coming from a long-time Nintendo supporter, the only console I got last generation was a Gamecube), might restrict their sales a bit it would not directly harm them.

But they are certainly not the only download console gaming guys around. X-box Live Arcade has been at it for months now, and has some very nice, original, games for it, and will only be getting more. And they have some of the greatest classic arcade games ever seen; whoever has been picking the out for Microsoft seems to know his stuff. Nintendo has some games that are equal, maybe even a little better, in quality (do not overestimate that "better" thing: objectively measured, Zelda may be awesome, but so is Robotron, just in a different way), but their greatest ally is volume, and so far that's fallen woefully short.

They may claim that the Wii is not trying to compete with the other new-gen consoles, and there is some truth to that, but they are competing directly in the downloadable games space, and so far Nintendo's only real advantages there are simplicity of use and the games themselves. We've heard murmurings about original Virtual Console games but for all we know those could go the way of the 64DD, discarded on a whim at any time in the future. We hear about all these games they COULD release, but COULD != WILL, and their statement that they're going to release a "greatest hits" selection is, frankly, idiotic when two of their US VC launch games are Pinball and Soccer. PINBALL AND F--KING SOCCER! If they're determined to launch early NES classics as well as later ones then where the hell is Ice Hockey?!

Meanwhile in Japan they already have Super Mario Bros! Even though the system launched a couple of weeks later in Japan than the US, at launch they have more games available, and knowing Nintendo, will probably continue to have more throughout the Wii's lifespan.

Nintendo! You cannot afford to do things like this any more! You've left your lunch right there on the table, and Microsoft is heading over with a hungry look in its eye!

And their appetite is boundless.

Labels: legal, nintendo, wii

--JohnH at 18:53

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Comment [ 16 ]

Exclusives truly dead

Could the pundits really be wrong? Of course. Third party exclusives are so dead that EA is having a whole studio work on exclusives for the Wii.

More from here:

"We do have two Wii games that we're working on right now," Cook said. "We also continue to do a lot of the work that we've done in the past, but going forward, our future will be exclusively Wii development."

[...]

"Things always change, but the plan is that we'll just be developing for the Wii."

And what platform are they abandoning? The Windows PC.

Labels: nintendo, wii

--jvm at 20:22

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Comment [ 3 ]

Third party exclusives: We're not dead yet!

The conventional wisdom about this generation of consoles contains two ideas that seem at odds:

1. The Wii will unquestionably succeed, possibly taking second place to Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3, primarily on the strength of its unique controller.
2. Because all three platforms will have significant marketshare third parties will be less likely to make games exclusive to one system.

You can hear both of these ideas, albeit at different times, in this week's Next-Gen.biz podcast. It seems to me that for the Wii to succeed it must have games which are tailored for its unique controller, and not just from Nintendo. Otherwise, it's simply a GameCube Turbo. Since neither of the other two systems has an input device comparable to the Wii's controller -- Sony's SIXAXIS really isn't the same thing -- that means Nintendo will have to encourage exclusives.

In fact, Nintendo has already been doing this. Just look at the Wii launch: Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam (Activision) and Red Steel (UbiSoft) and Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz (Sega) are all third party exclusives. While Madden NFL 07 (EA) isn't an exclusive, it is reworked heavily enough to use the Wii controller that it might as well be considered one. To maintain relevance, that kind of stream of exclusives will have to continue.

It is possible that Nintendo obtaining exclusives will push Microsoft and Sony to obtain similar agreements from publishers. These will likely be of the Grand Theft Auto and Splinter Cell variety: time limited exclusivity. Remember that such time-dependent exclusives mitigate the original development cost because the port is cheap to make, and publishers may not want to spend time crafting a game that extensively utilizes the Wii's controller. So Sony and Microsoft will benefit from such exclusives, but Nintendo will end up with games designed for a PlayStation or Xbox controller (i.e. more buttons) and some trivial Wii controller gimmicks -- if it gets a port at all.

I'm not saying that third party exclusives must continue or the Wii will fail, but it is difficult for me to see how their fates aren't inextricably tied. The end result is, as Campbell said in that same podcast, that the publishers "have a lot more power" and "do what they want to do". I'm arguably a Sony fan, but even I can appreciate that their fall from power is likely to improve the marketplace for developers and consumers. It isn't clear, however, that that independence is obviously good for the Wii.

Labels: nintendo, wii

--jvm at 21:28

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Comment [ 8 ]

Bomberman '93 is Excellent

When I drove a hundred miles to be home with Dad for Thanksgiving, I dragged my Wii along for the ride.

Unfortunately, due to an oversight, I neglected to drag its power supply along for that ride.

A scan through local retail outlets made it clear that replacement AC adaptors were not yet available in stores, and Gamecube adaptors don't fit. In the end, I ended up driving BACK to Statesboro, just to get the power supply. But it was all worth it, and for one reason above all else:

BOMBERMAN '93.

Back in the days before its battle game became progressively polluted with 3D, overly-gimmicky level layouts and dino buddies (JVM's coinage here, meaning Pokemon-like helper characters who follow you around wanting to be pals), the Bomberman series produced what could be the finest multiplayer games ever made. I and my friends got hooked playing Super Bomberman with a multitap on my SNES back in the day, and while that game is not yet available on Virtual Console, the similar Bomberman '93 was released last night, becoming the first must-own VC release. Many people missed this game on its original release since it was made for the Turbografx-16, the Gamecube of its time. It is only six bucks to boot.

Not only is the play the cleanest it has ever been, but it even supports five player games! The instructions explicitly state that, although the Wii only accepts up to four wireless controllers and four Gamecube controllers, by using a combination of the two types players can map controllers to each of a Turbo Tap's five virtual controller ports.

Bomberman-maker Hudson has announced that they plan to provide extensive support to Virtual Console, with dozens of games planned for eventual release. The company has some neglected gems in its history (the excellent Bonk's Adventure was also released last night), and they could well be Nintendo's best ally in the fight to unseat X-box Live Arcade from its comfortable spon on the console download gaming throne.

EDIT: Fixed the game's name, thanks to mgroves for pointing it out. Damn numbers.

Labels: nintendo, wii

--JohnH at 04:07

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Comment [ 10 ]

The Good, the Bad, and the (ugh) Wii

The epic tale of my wait in line for a Wii will be told some other day -- a story of happy chance, of suffering, of corruption, of sacrifice. A story, also, of about an hour total of playing Elite Beat Agents on my DS.

I haven't been able to play it an awful lot since getting it back to the apartment, as I have this pesky term paper to write, but as the Wii-blessed member of Curmudgeon Gamer's crack (as in "cocaine") staff of writers, I felt duty bound to put off working on my paper describe my experience.

Good:

• The controller, for the most part, works without a hitch, and better than I had been expecting. Its use in Wii Sports is almost like magic.
  
• Wii Sports is a better game than rumor had it and reviews have let on. Scores have been around the low-to-mid 7 range for it, they deserve to be higher. My roommates were almost fascinated with it when they saw it in action. The depth in the title is in perfecting your movements more than the strategy of the game itself, but the games are not bad. Bowling, in particular, with that controller in hand, is automatically the best console rendition of bowling of all time, because it is actually like bowling.
  
• Mii creation is a lot more fun than you might think. While the characters themselves are very simplistic, the creation options are not. They are even used in ingenious ways by Wii Sports, who will automatically fill out baseball teams with random Miis lounging around the console, potentially even those scavenged from friend's system's over the internet.
  
• Virtual Console games seem to work well. The two I've gotten so far, Solomon's Key and SimCity, are pretty much exactly like the originals, with one big difference in SimCity: saving took a while on the SNES, but here is instantaneous.
  
• If one goes back to the Wii menu before turning off a virtual console game, the next time the player plays it he'll find that his old "console" is exactly at the point where he left it. That is, the Wii actually saves the entire state of the virtual machine, in addition to supporting any built-in save function of the game.
  
• The unified, X-box 360-like menu system is cool. All games have a "Wii menu," even disk ones, and the player can end a game and return to the home page at any time, without a reboot.
  
• The video report of one website, which showed a video of the system taking over two minutes to copy the tiny NES game Donkey Kong to a SD card, turns out not to be the general case -- SNES SimCity takes maybe 10-20 seconds to copy to my own recently-purchased 512MB card. The age and speed of the card probably plays a role here.
  
• There are a number of of cool little things to discover while browsing through the options, like the message board that not only keeps records of how long you've played each game on a calendar-like screen, but even functions as a basic email client. I'm surprised that the big gaming blogs haven't made a big deal over the fact that you can actually send mail to any email address, provided the recipient replies to an initial confirmation message.
  
• The pointer hands on the menu screens rotate when you rotate the controller! So cool! There is also an entertaining little animation when a Virtual Console download is going.
  
• Zelda is, indeed, great.

Bad:

• However, Zelda is not as great as it could have been, and the problem is not the graphics. It is the storytelling. A lot of people have been raving about how the story of this one is darker than the others almost from the start. I do not regard this as a good thing; the high-spirited adventure of the other games (especially Wind Waker) was one of the best things about them. This is just one more way that Zelda is becoming like its copiers (that is to say, practically all other action-adventures).
  
• More on Zelda: these games have traditionally been actually rather light on story, leaving the player on his own to do all the things that need to be done. My first three hours of Zelda, on the other hand, were hand-held almost the whole way. Zelda games need to give the player space so he can explore! I've not seen any of that yet, although maybe once I hit Hyrule Field this'll change.
  
• Upon initial connection to the internet there are two major system updates, each of which taking quite a while to complete. This may be from Nintendo's servers being slammed, but they should take note, this isn't going to get better in the future. System updates are always a cause for trepidation since an interrupted update may result in a bricked system, and there have been stories of this happening.
  
• The email client is an unexpected nicety, true, but it is hampered by the fact that you have to type using the virtual keyboard. It's faster than control pad based solutions, and it has a cell phone-like quick keypad feature, but it's nowhere near as quick as using, say, a USB keyboard.
  
• By the way, USB keyboards do not work.
  
• I did have one bad moment with the remote. After one particular update, my remote suddenly ceased functioning. I checked my second remote and it wasn't working either! Whenever I pressed a button, the lights on the remote flashed several times then went dark. Turning off and on the console didn't work, there were no bright lights in the room and there was no obvious RF interference. Ultimately I restored their function by guessing that holding in the power button for a few seconds would do a "hard reset." Fortunately I was correct, and upon turning it back on again the controllers worked normally.
  
• The Shop Channel is in bad shape. Several times now I've tried accessing it, only to be stuck for several minutes at the "Connecting...." screen. There is no way to cancel the connection early without doing a hard (not a soft) reset in the manner described above. When it does work it is responsive, but one has to get that far first.
  
• As is typical for Nintendo, their features that interact with not-made-by-Nintendo data tend to be slapdash. A user can listen to MP3s while looking at photos but there is no standalone MP3 player! That oversight seems malicious enough to be intentional. The viewer channel can display JPEGs and MOVs, full stop. Some of these problems may essentially go away once Opera is released, but probably only in the little world of the browser.
  
• Internet features are a bit less developed at launch than I was expecting. No Turbografx games, only one N64 game and two SNES and Genesis titles, and a NES roster padded out by first-generation dreck (although it does have the awesome Solomon's Key). X-box Live Arcade is mostly original stuff with a few recreations so they aren't expected to have a huge number of downloads available, but the stuff in Virtual Console is all emulated! There is little reason that ALL of Nintendo's first party output for their systems isn't available now. The Internet Channel, the Forecast Channel AND the News Channel, basically most of the system's internet support, is MIA for launch as well.
  
• Finally, and for me most dishearteningly, Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz seems to be a shadow of the first two games. Who the hell's idea was it to drop Challenge Mode?!

Labels: nintendo, wii

--JohnH at 23:05

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Comment [ 13 ]

Analyst analyzes analysts' analyses

Michael Pachter makes a good guest in this week's Next-gen.biz podcast. He comes across as "a man who likes talking to a man who likes to talk" and goes on at length about various aspects of the Wii, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3. In particular, I was intrigued by this bit:

I think that where most analysts are going to be not only proven wrong but are actually going to backtrack and change their opinions to the extreme is that the cost of the Wii at $249 is so dramatically much lower than the cost of the [Xbox] 360 or of a PS3 that many households are going to opt for a Wii first and wait for the others to come down in price before they buy a 360 or a PS3. [...]

I think what's going to happen is analysts are going to see the Wii selling at a much more rapid pace mid-year next year than anybody expected and they're actually going to call Nintendo the winner of this cycle.

And in fact, what I think is going to happen is, over time, Nintendo's sales are going to slow -- over time as in 2009, 2010 -- and Sony's sales are going to pick up as the PS3 comes down in price.

So I think Sony's going to look like the clear loser this cycle, come summer. I think Nintendo's going to look like the clear winner this cycle this coming summer, and that's going to be wrong. And it will reverse in 2009, 2010 when there are 5000 Blu-Ray movies available to rent at Blockbuster and when all the households who already have a Wii get their HD monitors and PS3 sales will pick up.

The part about choosing the Wii first is certainly plausible -- especially because of standard TV and the prices of HDTVs -- and it's a prediction I think we could easily check up on in 10-12 months. Will we be reading about Nintendo winning the war less than a year after their launch? That'd be fun, especially if you read videogame web forums. Then in two years we can see if Sony's made up ground and beating the competition, as he further predicts, making all those other analysts who declared a Nintendo victory for the generation wrong. Good times ahead, either way.

I've still got 15 minutes of the podcast to listen to, but that won't happen until tomorrow morning on the way to work. Perhaps there are some more interesting bits later on. I certainly enjoyed the first 30 minutes.

One question that hadn't been asked of Pachter that I'd like an answer to: Does he play games? It's pretty apparent he's got a feel for the business of games, but does he actually play them or is he just a detached observer watching numbers and analyzing technology trends in the abstract?

Update: Answer is that Pachter does play games and even plays them at work. In addition to what sounds like playing as part of his job, he mentions a Guitar Hero party they're having at his workplace. I should get Guitar Hero at some point, since I keep hearing such good things about it.

Update 2: Interesting to note that Pachter basically doesn't mention any specific way that the Xbox 360 wins. If Blu-Ray takes off (or HD-DVD doesn't succeed, take your pick) or the Sony PlayStation brand remains strong, then the PlayStation 3 wins. And Guitar Hero is the proof that the Wii's new control mechanism will be a hit with consumers. For Microsoft to win, I'm guessing he thinks that the other two have to fail, which isn't necessarily the same as Microsoft succeeding on its own strengths.

Labels: microsoft, nintendo, ps3, sony, wii, xbox360

--jvm at 20:08

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