Caravan

Sexay Rouge-likes... *drool*

You could do a setup where you use the triggers to pick/whammy (or have a tilt sensor for whammy), and use the d-pad/buttons for the frets. Heck, if they don't try to jam stylus controls in there, you could do an even more intricate scheme where the D-Pad controls octave (up and down) and slides (left and right for up and down the string), and the de-pads are for frets... Up up to do that tough solo, down down to get back to the rhythm section afterward...

Then there's the opportunity for wireless multiplayer (two guitars and a bass... or three basses for Big Bottom!).

Maybe I'm a little too excited about this.

Another big advantage to tabletop/human-run games is the "HOuse Rules" factor. My friends and I played Kill Doctor Lucky with a soundtrack of songs we picke,d one for each room. If you were in the room ready to make the killing blow with your room's song on the stereo, you got a bonus to your weapon. It's little (or in our case, involved and dorky) things like that that make tabletop games so much fun to play.

@ #5

Obviously much more than Microsoft pays people to wait in line for the Japanese X-Box 360 Launch...

Illiteracy is a scourge. Dual-Shake was the tongue-in-cheek suggestion made by Joystiq for the PS3 controller's name. Now, go back and read the first sentence of the post again.

Ah, but: is the problem sensory immersion (i.e., "you can tell you're looking at a game"), or is the problem intellectual/emotional investment?

If the senory immersion is complete, but the content uncompelling, would we still play? What if it was a perfect VR simulation of working in a cubicle, doing repetitive data entry for 8 hours? Perfect sensory immersion, yes, but the gameplay is not compelling. I'm not invested enough.

Investment can be as simple as a challenge: eat the dots before the ghosts get you. Climb the building without getting hit by a barrel. Make four perfect lines out of these weird blocks. Now, in that cubicle simulator, if you were able to flirt with the girl in the next cube while doing data entry, there's a game.

"The cat sat on the mat" is not a story; "the cat sat on the dog's mat" is. I don't know who said that, but there's a kernal of truth there that I think applies to game design as well.

Simple graphics, demo-style mechanics, real-world activities simulated on the console. This is designed to be uintimidating, the steps into the shallow end of the gaming pool for the non-gaming grandmas, and a simple "Get familiar with the Wii's new controls" package. Saturating the experience with complex graphics and gameplay would intimidate, and ultimately drive people away from playing the Wii.