Remember Aaron Davies, the Wii fan who made it his mission to find out why Nintendo first-party releases were always delayed in Australia and New Zealand ?

Aaron produced a convincing report detailing the significant lag times between the Australian and North American release dates. After discussions with Nintendo, he was asked to submit questions for Nintendo Australia to address. You can see his questions relating to localization, release delays and region locking on his site. And the response from Nintendo, after requesting said questions ?

“Nintendo Australia has no comment; Nintendo Australia does not comment on these issues.“

Beyond lame, refusing to comment is just insulting to their customers. Read the rest of this entry »

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 !!