dan

I think it's just a natural part of the economy. Someone makes the iPod, the Wii... and everyone rushes to capitalize on it with accessories, knockoffs, and a lot of crap that really isn't worthy. Consumers respond, and the crap naturally filters out. Within a few years, only the strong survive.

I expect one more year of crap. You're going to see a lot of casual titles failing, and people refining what a *good* casual game is. This is also going to be the year that the pendulum begins swinging back to the middle, towards a balance between casual games and hardcore games.

I really loved this game back in the day.

MadWorld looks boring, and the graphics look unclear.

Which is too bad. Because I do believe that mature games can be a real art. And the number of hardcore action games has been pretty limited on the Wii. But this looks like a really repetitive and dull game, when you get down to the gameplay.

But I really really really want them to prove me wrong.

yeah, the gray has no personality.

but the red will be back one day. I'm optimistic.

I'd definitely prefer that EA not dominate every aspect of the gaming industry, particularly sports.

But if the alternative is that nobody so much as tries to make a huge, fun sports game on the Wii... then yeah, it's really important that EA keep pushing.

Competition is good for the system. I don't feel like third-parties have fully "gotten" the Wii yet.

Mario Galaxy WAS hard -- if you went for all the bonus stars.

I think that's gonna be the only way they please us, and still expand the blue ocean. The basic game, you'll never die if you're basically competent. But if you chase all the secrets, expect a challenge. Final Fantasy does a good job of this, with fighting Bahamut and so on.

I think the Wii has yet to live up to its full potential. I'm hopeful that a game like The Conduit will do it. I'm hopeful that the new Zelda, designed exclusively for the Wii and not GameCube+, will get us there. I'm hopeful that No More Heroes 2 will make use of Wii Motion Plus and get us there.

So far, I've seen some of that potential. I'm impressed and happy. Me and my girl had a LOT of fun playing Mario Kart together. Mario Galaxy was great, and it was stuff like blowing bubbles and rolling on a ball that made the game awesome -- more than waggling through a star. Metroid had a lot of great moments, and shooters make a lot of sense.

But the console has to hit its potential before they announce a new one. Or else there will be a lot of bitter people, reluctant to buy the next system that promises to do what this system should have been doing all along.

funny how the parts of the world where science flourishes, they agree we need to take big but reasonable steps to transition to more efficient and sustainable energy technologies. i don't have much respect for the pockets of the world that believe the world is less than 10000 years old, dispute climate change, want to block scientific advances like stem cells, and believe STDs are a plague from god.

let's give Nintendo a huge pat on the back for getting ahead of the curve on this. a lot of companies in Silicon Valley and Japan are pretty progressive.

This is a cool idea. A game where you play a character who gradually grows up, making choices about the man you become. Just not in an RPG way. Something more subtle, and less number-driven.

I share people's worries that it could become too casual-driven. But I happen to think that the recent zelda games have become too "itemy", with just too much complexity for no real payoff. There were a lot of items you'd use once or twice, and lots of items that just weren't fun. I love the bow and arrow, the bombs, the hookshot, the boomerang, just to name a few. But many of the items just got in the way. And even for some of the items I liked, they were really tedious: like putting on your scuba suit and taking it off, or combining items together. There has to be a cleaner way to do some of those things.

I would gladly accept a game with half as many items if they made the actual use of those items more interesting: using your sword to spin and float like a whirlwind, smashing the ground to create an earthquake, bouncing bombs off of walls, using the hookshot to swing back and forth, using the hookshot to drag and whip items around, throwing items at different distances. Using a sword, a wand, an axe, a spear with different motions to achieve different combat results. Rather than unlocking 40 items, you'd unlock Less about cluttering up your inventory, and more about unlocking new ways to use your inventory.

I'd also accept a game with half as many items if the world itself were more intricate. Not just voice acting and an epic story. But sequences where you're leading a BraveHeart-like charge against Ganon's army. Sequences where you're trying to sneak through a castle without detection. Sequences where you cut a rope bridge to stop the enemy, or flip over a table to duck behind it. And not just once or twice, but peppered throughout the game.

I think there's a way to make the gameplay more intuitive, and yet still make the world more fun and interesting to interact with. It comes from more creative level-design and Wii-mote controls, and taking some complexity out of your inventory management.