Nintendo Holds Press Conference, Continues to Disappoint

Today, Nintendo held a pretty big press conference, possibly to apologize for saying “screw you” to their core audience at E3.  I would have loved for them to unveil a new Zelda game, an updated re-imagining of Kid Icarus, or a Wii hard drive–even though I no longer have a Wii, I’d go out and buy another one next week if Nintendo finally unleashed all of that console’s potential (or just hit up my little brother, who I kind of gave my Wii to).

Unfortunately, what we got was even more…stuff that…well, it does all kinds of stuff is what it does.  Nothing particularly useful or enjoyable, nothing that moves the industry forward, but it’s…well, let’s look at the highlights.

• The New DS. The Nintendo DSi will be slimmer (no backwards compatibility), have a digital camera, and support SD cards.  You can load MP3s onto that SD card and play it back over the console.  It’s not a bad piece of hardware, if you don’t already own a Nintendo DS…and a digital camera…and an MP3 player.  I don’t know what Nintendo’s thing is for re-releasing their portables a hundred times (Game Boy, Game Boy Pocket, Game Boy Color followed by Game Boy Advance and Game Boy Advance SP finally to be wrapped up with DS and DS Lite), but it’s getting old.  Real old.  I understand that the Big N has to constantly draw in a new consumer base, but I’d much rather they spend more time developing hardware and let it loose when it’s at its peak.
• The Wii Speak channel. Wow, a place where you can talk with your friends online–after exchanging 97-digit friend codes and buying a $30 peripheral.  Cutting edge that is.  It’s called Skype, Nintendo.  You might have heard of it.
• Club Nintendo. You get free stuff for spending money; you earn points when you buy stuff, and you can trade those points in for swag.  Unless that free swag is more games or really sweet collectibles, I just don’t see how it would be worth the effort–not to mention that it’s quite obvious that this is just another way for Nintendo to print more money, not to reward their loyal fan base who has kept them afloat when they were the laughing stock of mainstream gaming (the Gamecube years).
• The “Play for Wii” collection. These will be Gamecube games revamped for game play on the Wii and re-released for the white box.  I have to say, if Nintendo uses this as a way to get some obscure Gamecube titles back on the market, I can’t complain.  Pikmin is the first game scheduled to come off the line.  I can’t hate too harshly on this, other than Nintendo has done this before (Game Boy Advance Classics Series), and I’d rather have dev teams coming up with all new titles–considering that the Wii plays Gamecube games just fine.
• Finally, the biggest joke from the whole thing was that Nintendo is now allowing downloading of games to and uploading games from SD cards. Seriously?  This is their solution to a constrained hard drive on the Wii?  Not a USB hard drive, which would have made a whole lot of hot, steaming sense?  Talk about screwing over your consumers.  The Wii only works with 2 GB or less SD cards; the MSRP on a 2 GB SanDisk card is $39.99, while a Microsoft 120 GB HD costs $180.  You would have to buy 60 of those cards–at forty bucks a pop–to get the same amount of storage space.  Mind=blown.  The only comfort we can take in is that there is probably not 120 GB of content worth paying for on the Wii Shop channel.

So, there’s Nintendo’s big press conference.  There were a few announcements about games–a release date of March 2009 for MadWorld and Nintendo is going to be the publisher of The Conduit–but that’s your big news.  Terribly underwhelming I know.

Nintendo Wii A Disappointment

After reading the E3 report in September’s Game Informer, I have to say that the Nintendo Wii could end up being a critical failure/commercial success.

I won’t go into details about Game Informer’s coverage (I do encourage you to go out and buy the magazine), but I will say that the biggest disappointment was the lack of announcing a Zelda, Mario, or Metroid title for next year.  At every major gaming convention and conference in years past, Nintendo has always unveiled a new entry for their big three; not so this time–not even a Pokemon game.

Instead, the big news was Animal Crossing: City Folk and Wii Music.  Animal Crossing looks to be Second Life for the Wii, with an almost-exclusive focus on online social interaction, and Wii Music could be the most pathetic concept for a piece of software I have ever seen: up to four players use their Wii Remotes to make music (and by music, I mean noise), and nobody has to keep rhythm or play correct notes; you just sort of bang around and see what comes out.  Yes, it does encourage creativity and exploration, but it has no element of challenge, and I find it really hard to call something a game if there is not an element of challenge; and I find it hard to praise a software’s capacity for creation when there is no sense of design or precision about it.

Also, Nintendo has effectively shut-out third part developers, keeping them in the dark about new peripherals that could have made for some really awesome games: Wii Motion Plus (an attachment to the remote that makes for better motion detecting) and Wii Speak (a powerful microphone that allows for online chat).

At this point, its obvious that Nintendo is interested in one market and one market only: the casual gamers.  There is nothing wrong with this, but there is something wrong with abandoning all the potential that your console has in favor of pandering to people who have never held a controller when it is the dedicated fans that have kept you in business during the darkest of times (the Gamecube years anyone?).  Yes, please bring in new gamers to the fold.  Yes, please make games that appeal to everybody.  However, don’t do so at the expense of making rich and rewarding experiences for those gamers who want something with some meat to it–or for those casual gamers who want something more once they are done with playing cooking simulators and mini-game compilations.

Twenty years ago, Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda attracted people to video games.  They were simple in their design, but had a complexity to them that was not apparent at first, a complexity that made for satisfaction and excitement, a complexity that built a sense of exploration and discovery.  The Nintendo Wii had so much potential to change the way we think about and play games while renewing the fun we all had playing those early titles; unfortunately, the Big N seems disinterested in anything but producing instant gratification.

Thank goodness we still have the Nintendo DS; at least that console has some quality game play.