Games
Where Do Wii Go From Here?
By Geoff Goldhar February 25, 2008 - 08:00
Okay,
so Super
Smash Bros. Brawl
is out in practically two weeks. You won’t find anyone more jazzed
for it than me. I mean, I’m the kind of guy who listens to the
soundtrack and gets all weak in the knees when he hears a remix of
Type B from Tetris.
But there’s something odd about Nintendo’s big-release for the
first quarter of '08.
It
doesn’t use the motion-sensing at all. I mean at all, not even for
pointing at menus. It’s a rather odd thing. I mean, notably they
want to maintain the same feeling as the franchises’ previous
games, and the Wii Remote doesn’t really work for 2D fighting games
that well... But it’s odd. (There are even pictures of the games
creator playing with a Nintendo GameCube controller, and only the
Nintendo GameCube controller).
In
fact it doesn’t seem like anyone has actually…grasped the Wii
Remote yet, so to speak. Outside of Nintendo, most Wii Remote
functionality is delegated to simple movements, replacing “Press
A”, with “Move the remote up NOW.” It seems as though that
developers don’t have the time or the money to finagle games that
incorporate full motion controls outside of a pointer or some vague
movement. Even big name games like The
Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess
and Super
Mario Galaxy
reduced the majority of Wii-interactivity to pointing and wiggling
your arm at the screen. Other games like Fire
Emblem: Radiant Dawn
and the aforementioned Brawl
do away with even the most basic functionality and leave everything
to the face buttons.
The
reason that I’m saying this now is because at the GDC this year, EA
unveiled head-tracking for an upcoming game called Boom Blox.
(http://gonintendo.com/?p=36198)
You may have seen the YouTube video of that guy who reversed the
“dialogue” of the Sensor Bar and Wii Remote (see below). He mounted the Wii
Remote on the TV, and wore two LED sensors on his glasses, much like
the Sensor Bar. Using this he could move his head and look “around
the screen”, creating the illusion of depth WITHIN the television..
Then using a second Wii Remote, he was able to point around and shoot
targets. Very novel application, and it appears EA wants to attempt
something similar.
It’s
really a direction developers have to take, trying new things with
the hardware, attempting STRANGE things with the hardware. When the
Nintendo DS came out, a lot of the applications of the Touch Screen
were rather pedestrian, limiting the thing to basically a second
series of buttons.. It wasn’t a year until, you know, people
actually TRIED some real innovation and struck a balance between
quirky and non-functional and functional and incredibly boring. This
is what I hope is happening with the Wii, and we start seeing third
parties putting out more odd, quirky games, rather than “$19.99
Shovelware Funpack Extravaganza” It’s sad because it seems as
though the system is becoming a home to these cheap, poorly made
games.
I
mean if you read Masahiro Sakurai’s GDC interview about Brawl,
he goes on and on about years of thought and planning put into every
aspect of the game. I wish every game had that level of…well...
Love put into it. Because that’s truly what it’s all about for
any sort of artistic endeavor; Love what you do, and what you create.
When I look over the wall of Wii selections at retailers, I have a
hard time finding anything within that level of creative adoration
towards one's own work… Some games like Zack
& Wiki: Quest for Bararos' Treasure,
and No
More Heroes
demonstrate this level of care and time applied to the games
creation, but not many more.
A
lot of the problem is that the Wii is treated primarily like a toy in
the Japanese market. Your average Xbox 360 owner will purchase seven
games over the consoles lifespan, this number varies WILDLY depending
on how dedicated one is to the
medium, but seven is the likely
number. Your average Japanese gamer owns Wii Sports.
Most others will own Wii
Sports,
Wii
Play,
and Wii
Fit...
Other popular titles will include the first party ‘champions’ of
the system – Mario,
Zelda,
Metroid
Prime 3: Corruption...
Here it seems to be shaping up the same way. A large number of third
party publishers aren’t really bringing their A-Game to the table,
besides Capcom who has done some astounding things so far. Japan is
where most of Nintendo’s “big” games come from, and in the last
few generations only a small portion of truly significant Nintendo
titles have come from North America or Europe (Especially since Rare
took their ball and went to Microsoft. And now Goldeneye
might be on Xbox Live.)
Nintendo
will be pushing some new functionality on the system in '08, the most
striking thus far to be the promise of new Wii Ware games and
Downloadable Content, which brings up the problem of storing titles
on the Wii’s rather meager storage capacity, but they say they’ll
compress the games and “stream” them from compression, expanding
and reducing content as it’s required during play. That sounds
tricky and such storage problems may hinder development of titles..
But having an online marketplace full of interesting, unique, cheap
(key word) titles has worked wonders for Xbox Live and, to a smaller
extent, the Playstation Network.
Not
that any of this matters immediately. You can barely keep a Wii in a
store long enough to warm up from the inside of the delivery truck.
The system is a fiscal monster that eats people’s money and craps
solid GOLD. The Wii is an amazing system solely because EVERYONE has
some insane story about how they got their own!
“How
did you get that glass eye, Mike?” “Mario
Galaxy is awesome!” “I
see.”
But
as soon as everyone who wants one, has one, they’re going to want
games for it... And considering even the best Wii titles barely
scrape the price point of the cheaper PS3 titles, people are going to
able to afford to buy a lot of them… The market requires innovation
on a grand scale, this isn’t next-gen graphics, but next-gen
gameplay, and it appears that the latter is going to be a lot harder
to produce than we thought.
Geoff
Goldhar - Wrestled
a Baltic Squid for his Wii. True story.