Do you remember why we were all excited about the Wii last year? Besides the Virtual Console, I can remember the promise of a deluge of fun, new games, played in a way we had never played before. Swinging the controller around seemed like such an innovative new approach to controls, and we all dreamed of playing Wii in big groups gathered around it, everyone with smiles on their faces.
Yet, here I am, four months into the console’s life cycle, and the only Wii game I really want to play is still Zelda: Twilight Princess. In fact, that’s the only game I can see myself truly wanting for Wii until the first week of April. That’s five months without a single game I want coming out for the system that has so much promise. I think if I actually had bought a Wii back in November, I’d be pretty disappointed by now.
Sure, there have been some new games, but after having played some of them, I’m not sure if I’d have been satisfied had purchased them. SSX Blur and its “on again, off again” controls and Warioware’s “fun but short by design,” design, are just some of the things I’m referring to. I see that Pirates of the Caribbean, TMNT, Spider-man 3, Mortal Kombat, and The Godfather will be out by the summer, but are these really games to be excited about? For the most part, it seems that third party developers are just taking games made for traditional controllers and mapping those to different movements with the Wii controller. Does it work? Sometimes. Is the game more fun? Not usually. Here’s my question: what ever happened to Wii-mote resulting in more intuitive controls?
Frankly, I’m pretty sad that all we really have to look forward to are first party Nintendo games that don’t really have set release dates (except Super Paper Mario), but that’s just like Gamecube, and we all know how that turned out. What’s even more saddening is that the DS seems to be suffering from the same problem. What was the last game that really caught fire for the DS? I’d say New Super Mario Bros. and that came out almost a year ago. I convinced so many people to get DS’s last year. Those people need something to play!
Someone needs to get on the ball and make some truly new and exciting stuff for Nintendo’s consoles and fast, before the novelty wears out. Wii’s still seem to be selling like hotcakes, so let me ask you, what are you doing with your Wii’s?