There is some lively discussion going on (in amongst the tired old “oh, but the hardware is inferior” comments) surrounding an article at WiiFanboys ..”It’s Time to Stop Porting Shit to the Wii“. Splosion of WiiFanboys has a point …
“So stop porting all your shit games to the Wii;they don’t work, they look like shit, and it’s a waste of everybody’s time.”
The tone of the article makes me think it could be a joke or satire, but even if it is a joke, Splosion has a real point. There are far too many developers porting games from previous gen consoles to the Wii. Sure, there are some real gems worth tweaking and relaunching on the Wii … take for instance Resident Evil 4. But there are also a bunch of games being ported to the Wii that were not even considered all that great ‘in their time’. Take a B-grade game, rush to port it to the Wii, tack-on a Wiimote control scheme, and you end up with what amounts to a bunch of fairly dubious releases over the past year. One that comes to mind is Rampage: Total Destruction (I own this game. I’ll review it some time and try try try to be forgiving).
My feeling is simply that game developers and publishers have been taken by surprise. I suspect many of them were gearing up to focus on the Xbox 360 and PS3, and expected the Wii to have a lacklustre reception, similar to that of the disappointing sales of the Gamecube. Now that the Wii is selling like hotcakes (and faster than Nintendo can make ‘dem hotcakes), they are scrambling to get releases in the pipeline so they can grab a piece of the market. What’s the fastest and easiest way to get a game to market for the Wii ? That’s right … port one from the Gamecube. There is also some talk that Nintendo didn’t give third party game developers enough support in the lead up to the release of the Wii, which could explain some things.
I’m almost certain things will improve in the future, once these development houses get their acts together. In the meantime …. don’t encourage them … stop buying shitty ports to the Wii !!
With the Hanabi Festival month on Virtual Console drawing to a close, Nintendo has treated Australian (and European) Wii owners to another couple of previously Japanese-only games. As promised, they released Gradius III (SNES), Legend of Hero Tonma (Turbografx-16), and the highly anticipated cult-classic, Sin and Punishment: Successor of the Earth (N64).
Sin and Punishment: Successor of the Earth (N64) is a rail-based shooter, in the third person.
There is an informative review of Sin and Punishment over at cubed3 .. the consensus is that Sin and Punishment is dark and moody, fast-paced, and while a little too short, probably still has some replay value even if you finish it in a few hours. Two player mode allows one player to control the movement of the character (dodging bullets) while the other player aims and shoots. I was hoping they would rework the game controls to use the Wii Remote as a ‘light gun’ … no such luck.
Here’s the executive summary. Jessica Zenner, a (former) Nintendo employee, has a personal blog, “Inexcusable Behavior”. She wrote this blog anonymously, and wrote some rude stuff about another employee at Nintendo. Here’s the juicy quote:
“One plus about working with hormonal, facial-hair-growing, frumpy women is that I have found a new excuse to drink heavily. Yeah, that’s right, I’m buying Grey Goose in bulk now, and I do not feel the slightest amount of shame. I am awestruck by a particular woman at work; as a matter of fact, she’s inspired me to add a new character to my latest novel. She has the perfect attributes for “Beatrice” (my new character). She has atrocious frown lines that look even worse when mixed with a pompous, pretentious smirk. This person has provided me with the perfect brainwave for my new character; I get so excited when I run across an archetypal sour puss. And it gets even better…I get to see her everyday! My gut tells me that this woman hasn’t been f***ed in years, and is just upset about it.”
Somehow Jessica got found out by her supervisors at Nintendo and was fired. Shame they let her go, it looks like she has a great creative mind and could have been put to use in some game development (like an adult RPG maybe … Oh yeah, I forgot, Nintendo like to make money from adults but they don’t like to do adult games …).
They really should have given her a promotion. I can already see the headlines now reverberating throughout the blogsphere … “Super Smash Bros. Brawl Dojo update – New character Beatrice the archetypal sour puss.“. Or “New Beatrice move : devastates opponents with her pompous pretentious smirkattack.“. Man, I really want to play that character now … if the Super Smash Bros. Brawl developers are reading this, I have two words for you … Easter Egg !!
Many of you will have guessed based on the high number of Virtual Console focused posts here that I’m a big fan of classic arcade and retro games … so you can imagine my excitement when I discovered this release in the works: Namco Museum Remix for the Wii.
I’m really looking forward to this one, assuming that the versions of games like Pac Man (sadly, not Ms. Pac Man) are good emulated arcade versions. There will be 14 games in total, including five ‘remixed’ titles which are loosely based on the original retro versions but have new 3D graphics and Wii Remote motion controls.
<rant>
To tell the truth, I don’t really care all that much about the ‘remixed’ versions … essentially they will be entirely new games with no real similarity to the retro versions. The ‘remixes’ may be good games in their own right if they turn out to be playable with the new control scheme, but for me most of the appeal of retro games is the clean simple 2D graphics and bold bleepy sound. There are reasons why old games like Galaga are considered classics and can still be sold even today … they are still fun to play. Galaga doesn’t need some unproven 3D remix gimmick to make it any better, it works just fine as-is. Going 3D just adds extra visual complexity and usually spoils things. But we will see ….
</rant>
Below is a video of the Rally-X ‘remix’, followed by the Galaga ‘remix’ which is essentially a rail-based shooter ala Duck Hunt (or for a modern Wii game comparison, it’s like the shooting levels in Rayman Raving Rabbids). The ‘remix’ has no real similarity to Galaga, but looks like it could be fun in it’s own right.
I was looking at the HTML source for the Wii Shop recently, using some of the guidance provided by various Wii hackers shortly after the console was first released. Perusing the code, it is clear there are many error messages to deal with various situations (wrong credit card number, bad Wii Points Card number, etc). Two that caught my eye were:
“The card number you entered can only be used to download specific titles. It is not a Wii Points Card.”
“You have downloaded this title before, and your trial period has expired. You cannot redownload it.”
Interesting …. looks like at some point Nintendo is intending to have Wii Points that can only be used to to download specific games (special promotions or pack-ins with Wii discs ? competition winners ? gift cards ?). Even more interesting is the suggestion that maybe there will be trial versions of some games on Virtual Console or WiiWare in the future. I know a lot of people would like this .. and while it would probably hurt the sales of some crappy games, overall I think “try before you buy” would increase sales of the better games.
