Thoughts on Nintendo’s Successor to the Wii

Over the past week and a half, details about Nintendo’s next console have been trickling out. IGN has done an excellent job keeping track of all this information here. There’s lots of juicy tidbits to speculate on, like how the screen on the controller will work with the main console, but what I want to focus on is Nintendo’s overall strategy with Wii 2/Project Cafe/Stream: recapturing the hardcore gaming market.

With a system more powerful than PS3 or XBox 360, a price point of $350-400 dollars, and a more traditional controller (even with the added screen), it’s clear Nintendo is going to try to appeal to the hardcore gamer. The key to Nintendo’s success in this area though won’t be the graphical capabilities of Project Cafe or the fact you won’t be “waggling” the controller, it will be Nintendo’s approach to online gaming.

Nintendo’s online approach with the Wii was a disaster. Rather than instituting some common sense parental controls, Nintendo went off the deep end by introducing a “Friend Code” system that killed Wii’s hardcore gamer appeal right out of the gate. Imagine if to find a friend on Facebook, you not only couldn’t search for their name, but you had to enter a 16-digit code that friend gave you, and that friend then had to enter in your 16-digit code as well. If Facebook had followed Nintendo’s model, we’d all still be on Myspace. Oh, and by the way, you also had to enter another Friend Code for every single game you wanted to play with that friend. Seriously.

Wii could have been a hardcore gamer’s dream, but Nintendo’s fear of, or apathy towards, online gaming killed any chance of that. Nintendo released a 4-player side-scrolling Mario game entitled “New Super Mario Bros. Wii” and refused to include an online mode. What other major publisher would release a top-notch 4-player game with no online mode? I certainly can’t think of one.

Rather than using a headset, Nintendo’s solution to online voice chat was to place a microphone directly in front of the television and to have your competing online gamers voices just come out of the television’s speakers. If online gaming was a car, Nintendo’s idea was to replace round wheels with square ones. Nintendo’s entire approach to online gaming on the Wii seemed to be to make it as unintuitive as possible.

If Nintendo is really going to aim for the hardcore gaming market, they need to support online gaming like they never have before. Nintendo’s approach with the Wii was to make online gaming as sanitized as possible for younger gamers and to tell older gamers to just deal with the restrictions. With Project Cafe, Nintendo will need to offer older gamers everything they expect from online gaming and just include some simple parental controls for those impressionable younger gamers. Friend Codes need to disappear, voice chat should use a headset, and every major multi-player release must have a comprehensive online mode. With these simple changes, Nintendo could find the success in the hardcore gamer market that they haven’t had since the Super Nintendo days.

Blog-A-Day Challenge: Day 21

My Favorite Third Party Wii Exclusive Titles

Since the Nintendo 64′s release, it’s been claimed there are no good third party games for Nintendo consoles. Admittedly, during the N64 and Gamecube days, quality third party titles were few and far between. There were a multitude of reasons for this, the most notable being Nintendo owners notoriously did not purchase many third party titles because the Nintendo first party games were so good. Also while Nintendo always innovated from a control perspective (without Nintendo, God knows what Sony or Microsoft would’ve based their controllers on) and gameplay perspective (N64 games Super Mario 64, Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time and Goldeneye all set the standard for 3-D games in their individual genres), they always seemed behind the times in the format those chose to release those game.While Sony was using CDs with their Playstation system, Nintendo was still using bulky, expensive, cartridges on the N64. Third party developers were scared away, but with the insane success of the Wii, many of those developers have come back into the Nintendo fold. Sadly, that same success led to so much craptastic shovelware being released for the system, sorting through the junk to find the truly entertaining third party titles for Wii has become very difficult. So here’s my list of my favorite 3rd party exclusive titles for the Wii:

FAMILY/ALL-AGES TITLES

EPIC MICKEY (Disney Interactive): Disney Interactive is cranking out a bunch of good licensed titles. Nothing groundbreaking, but very solid titles. The strength of Epic Mickey is the license and the paint/thinner mechanics. As Mickey, the player has to decide whether to be a good guy, and take what is often the more difficult route, by using paint to bring these dilapidated worlds back to life, or be the bad guy by using paint thinner to wreak havoc on these cartoon worlds and be a total jerk. The ending of the game is effected by what choices you make.

BOOM BLOX: BASH PARTY (Electronic Arts): I often describe Boom Blox as reverse Jenga. Instead of trying to build the tower up, in Boom Blox you want to knock it down. More than possibly any other title on Wii, this is one where you want your friends wearing the Wiimote wrist straps. You throw with the Wiimote in a motion just like you would throw a ball in real life. Bash Party is a sequel to the original Boom Blox and adds a lot more options. It’s not just throwing things, there’s shooting, pulling, and sling-shooting among other things. You also can download new puzzles online.

DISNEY’S GUILTY PARTY (Disney Interactive): Guilty Party is like the board game CLUE meets MARIO PARTY. You play as a member of a mystery-solving family. The voice acting in this game is shockingly good. While the characters in the game aren’t quite Pixar level, they’re definitely better than what you’ve found in most Disney flicks of the last 20 years. When taking part in a multiplayer game there’s a clever lie detector mechanic that allows the player questioning a subject to try and fake out his competitors. If you run your pointer over the suspect’s testimony the lie detector will tell you whether the suspect is telling the truth or not. On the other hand, if you press down on the “1″ button while pointing at the testimony, the lie detector will give you the opposite result. So only the player who did the questioning knows for sure whether the suspect was telling the truth.

A BOY AND HIS BLOB (Majesco Entertainment): A remake of the NES classic, the Wii version of A Boy and his Blob will just make you smile. The cel-shaded graphics make you feel like you’re actually watching a cartoon. I’ll admit the controls aren’t perfect, but you can take your time to solve most of the puzzles, so precision controls are only necessary a few times in the game. The game’s got such heart though that you can forgive the occasional control issue.

TEEN/MATURE TITLES

MADWORLD(Sega): Imagine the Sin City graphic novels as a video game and you’ve got an idea of the visual style of Madworld. The entire game is essentially black, white, and red. I’m not sure how this game even survived the ratings board, it’s the most violent game I’ve ever played and the game rewards you for disposing of bad guys in the most creatively despicable ways you can think of. The game also has a great (sick) sense of humor and top notch voice acting from John DiMaggio (Bender on Futurama, Dr. Drakken on Kim Possible).

NO MORE HEROES/NO MORE HEROES 2: DESPERATE STRUGGLE (Ubisoft): The No More Heroes series is a love letter to old school gaming. You play as Travis Touchdown, an assassin trying to rise in the ranks. To rise in the ranks of assassins, you have to kill everyone above you. The assassins leaderboard looks like the high score list of an 8-bit arcade game. In the second game of the series, you actually play NES-style mini-games to level up various attributes. Both games have a brilliant sense of humor. The motion controls are spot on, as you swing your Wiimote to swing Travis’s beam katana (it’s totally a lightsaber). It’s basically the light-saber game that Nintendo fans had been clamoring for since the announcement of Wii’s motion capabilities. The second game is much more polished that the first, and you can certainly play the second one without having played the first. But I recommend searching them both out because they are my favorite games on the system outside of the SUPER MARIO GALAXY titles.

GOLDENEYE 007 (Activision): METROID PRIME CORRUPTION established the first really good first-person shooter controls for a Wii game. THE CONDUIT then came along and built on those controls by allowing an insane amount of customization. Now Goldeneye 007 has taken the Conduit controls and applied them to a game with much better level design and a better online multiplayer mode. If you’re looking for a top notch first-person shooter on Wii, Goldeneye 007 is it.

Blog-A-Day Challenge: Day 7

Brea Grant’s Blog-A-Day Challenge (Day 1)

I really don’t update this blog enough. Every now and then I’ll write up an entry and it will get a tremendous amount of traffic, but rather than capitalizing on that by posting more content, I just get lazy. Last Friday, actress Brea Grant announced that for thirty straight days she would update her blog everyday. She also challenged others to join in, and this is day one. So here I am, joining in on the challenge, ignoring every lazy impulse in my body, and giving this my best shot. In an effort to make this slightly easier for myself, I’ve decided to have a specific column for most days of the week:

On Tuesdays, I’ll be bringing back PREVIOUSLY… IN COMICS, where I review the previous week’s comic books, so if you missed out on them last Wednesday at your local comic shop, you can look for them this week. This Tuesday’s column will focus largely on Marvel’s new uber-event, FEAR ITSELF.

That will be followed by WHEDON WEDNESDAYS, in which I will rave endlessly about one of my favorite subjects, Joss Whedon. The first column will be my TOP 10 FAVORITE BUFFY EPISODES.

The work week ends with FANTASY CASTING FRIDAY. I got so much positive feedback on my fantasy casting for THE AVENGERS, I thought this would be an ideal time to put my brain to work picking out the perfect cast for some other films. This Friday’s will be, not shockingly, superhero related.

Sunday will be videogame day (I don’t have a catchy name for it yet…), where, mostly, I’ll let my Nintendo fanboy out. This Sunday, I’ll give you a list of some of the quality 3rd party games available for the Wii.

So what about Monday, Thursday and Saturday? Well, I need a little wiggle room for any ranting I might want to do, but largely those days will be devoted to posting some of my artwork. But I’m not just going to post a photo of one of my paintings and leave it at that. I may post step-by-step process photos from a mural I painted, show sketches from my brainstorming sessions or, at least, explain the inspiration behind a piece. This blog is called Drawing Power, so focusing on more of my artwork is something I really should’ve done sooner.