Like many I suspect, I was ‘wowed’ with the Wii a great deal many months before it was even realeased. The concept seemed unbelievably innovative, a completely new way to control games without being bound to the traditional game pad. From first person shooters, to sports, to fighting games to whatever genre you could think of at the time, the possibilities seemed endless.

While the technology seemed promising their was still a strong bitter aftertaste of the slow agonising death of Nintendo’s previous console, the Gamecube. The gamecube primarily failed due to lack of third party support. Nintendo would put out their own games at an agonisingly slow rate and whilst they were generally excellent to play, in between these bouts of excellence you had to rely on other publishers to provide content for the system.

99% of the time these games were absolute garbage.

This became a primary concern of those who had been playing games for years and had lived through the complete abandonment of the Gamecube by Nintendo. How were Nintendo going to pull off third party support after most had already jumped the shinking ship we know as the Gamecube for Microsoft’s Xbox360 and Sony’s Playstation 3?

Then there was their Nintendo’s notorious treatment of PAL gamers which covered most of Europe and Australia. Often times PAL games were released months after their NTSC American and Japanese counterparts or worse still not at all.

In the end the hype over the system squashed these concerns. Lets face it, at release Wii Sports looked amazing and was too good to turn down. I have no doubt Wii Sports Tennis alone is responsible for millions of sales of this system worldwide.

The Wii system launched in Australia at the end of 2006 and we’ve just passed the two year anniversary mark. I got my wii mid 2007 and for the last year and a half have hardly used it, I began to ask myself why and after thinking about it for a while came to some very obvious conclusions. Most of which seem to be overlooked by the general public as Wii sales show no signs of slowing down.




Getting sucked in

Right from launch alarm bells should have been going off. Out of the 12 titles that were available on launch, two were actually worth getting; Nintendo’s own ‘The Legend of Zelda: The Twilight Princess’ and the third party ‘Red Steel’.

Red Steel wasn’t a brilliant game by any stretch of the imagination but it was a first taste at how the Wii remote could change the way gamers played first person shooters. The other first person shooter available at launch, Call of Duty 3 was ironically a lesson in how to completely stuff up a title with the Wii’s new controllers.

I remember the console itself costing me about $399 and then spending about that again purchasing another 3 controllers and nunchuks so i’d be able to play with other people. I imagine a lot of people got sucked in to the low comparitive price but wound up paying about $800 all up. This was as much if not more for the Wii ‘experience’ then the XBox and PS3 systems would have set them back.




Games

After the glow of Wii Sports wore off and you’d finished The Twilight Princess, the dissapointment started to set in. If you weren’t interested in the army of ‘party’ games being bashed out by every publisher under the sun for the Wii, you really had nothing to play.

The WiiShop channel offered absolutely nothing new to those of us who grew up playing games and if Nintendo thought I was going to pay for some game 10-20 years ago, they had better think again.

The Godfather: Blackhand Edition came out in March 07 and was the first decent game for the Wii after launch, albeit a Playstation port of a game that had already been released.

Then there was nothing until May when Nintendo’s Mario Strikers came out. It was a first party game and after 6 months it seemed the Wii was to meet the same fate as the Gamecube; nothing but crap between first party releases.

For the rest of 2007 the only games worth playing were:

• Resident Evil 4: June, 2007 (remake of an existing game)

• Scarface: July, 2007 (remake of an existing game)

• Super Paper Mario: September, 2007 (first party game)

• Metroid Prime 3: October, 2007 (first party game)

• Super Mario Galaxy: November 2007 (first party game)


Out of the 131 games released in 2007, just 7 were worth getting unless you were five years old or had the attention span of a an insect with a lobotomy.

2008 was equally as abysmal with just 8 worth getting out of the 267 games released;

• Zack and Wiki: January 2008 (first party game)

• Medal of Honour 2: February 2008 (severely crippled with no online play featured in Australia PAL release)

• Batallion Wars 2: February, 2008 (first party game)

• No More Heroes: March, 2008 (third party game)

• Mario Kart: April, 2008 (first party game)

• Smash Bros Brawl: June 2008 (first party game)

• Baroque: August 2008 (remake of previously releaseed PS2 game)

• Call of Duty 5: November 2008 (severly crippled online play)




Most notably with the exception of Call of Duty 5 there were no decent titles, first party or otherwise leading into the christmas period. Third party publishers seemed to have developed cookie cutter software producing drones which are able to pump out mediocre titles at an astronomical rate.

I mean come on, there’s only so many applications in a game you can assign ‘waggle the remote’ to and expect gamers to swallow it. WIth the exception of Mario Power Tennis, there’s nothing else to really look forward to in 2009.

This is exactly what happened with the Gamecube, once the anticipated first party titles came out the console died a slow and agonising death. So why is the Wii still topping the sales charts and how did it take out 6 of the 10 places for the top selling games in 2008?

Parents will buy their kids anything. Selling a game on the wii isn’t about the actual game itself, it’s become all about how great you can make the boxart look so that little Timmy wil beg and beg his mum to buy it for him so he can be entertained for a whole 5 minutes before realising the game is complete rubbish.




Game Disasters

Spitting in the face of Aussie gamers who were loyal and grew up on the original Ninentdo, the Nintendo 64  and then the Gamecube wasn’t enough. Nintendo figured they could ruin fun even more for people trying to give the console a chance.

The first slap in the face came from Medal of Honour 2. The single player experience was boring at best but what made this game shine was the combination of brilliant controls and a fantastic multiplayer experience.

So what went wrong? Some idiot decided Australia didn’t need the online component of the game and a special AU PAL version of the game shipped with absolutely no online support.

Then came Mario Kart, on it’s own this game is brilliantly fun and Nintendo got online perfect! Using homebrew however somebody hacked the game and now anyone can run around with unlimited items of their choice.

The suckerpunch? Nintendo have no way of patching the game or banning cheating consoles so online play on possibly the best game for their system is ruined. They just don’t care. Watch how devistating the hack is to online play in the Youtube clip below.


Mario Kart Wii online play is utterly broken, and Nintendo has no way of fixing it.

The final insult was in Call of Duty 5: World at War. This game was highly praised for it’s multiplayer component, not that you’d have any idea playing the Wii version.

The Wii version of COD5 shipped with a multiplayer component that wasn’t all that much different to Doom 2, which was released in 1994. Wake up Nintendo, it’s 2009 and gamers want more then depth to their multiplayer experience then just different versions of vanilla deathmatch.

This was also compounded by the fact that in the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions you are able to choose what region the game you join is, based on ping performance. In the Wii version 9 times out of 10 you wind up playing US or EUR games where even on 20Mbit broadband your ping is horrible and in short you get slaughtered before you fire off a shot.

I remember sitting on my couch trying to shoot other players in frustration as my bullets had no effect given the server had already tagged me as dead due to the lag difference.

That was the precise moment I decided enough is enough, it was time to turn my back on Nintendo, as they clearly had no interest in Australian gamers beyond milking unsuspecting parents with thousands of rubbish titles with pretty box art.




Where to from here?

To be honest I’m not sure how long it’s going to take for people to realise just how much of a con this system really is.

The Wii is going to survive as long as there’s parents willing to buy crap for their kids, so it’s probably not going anywhere anytime soon. What started out as a promising balance between gamers and casual players has quickly turned into a one sided flop favouring the lucrative money making casual gamer market.

You don’t need to be original or innovative, any idiot publisher can crank out a game for the Wii. All they have to do is put ”party’ in the title, spend a couple of thousand on a ‘cool’ box cover and they are guaranteed fifteen billion sales in the first week.

Nintendo care so little about their Australian market they can’t even get ‘Club Nintendo’ going. The premise of the club is a place where gamers can “swap points earned from the purchase of games and hardware for exclusive Nintendo goodies and Wii points”.

Nintendo have already distributed points cards and have been promising gamers the club for over a year, but at this stage nobody’s holding their breath.

The Wii channels have been an abysmal failure here in Australia adding absolutely nothing of value to the console. While Nintendo gear up to launch ‘Wiinoma’, an internet television channel for the console in Japan, given the attrocious state of download limits on our internet don’t expect this to ever see the light of day in Australia.

Now that all the first party titles are out there’s literally nothing to look forward to most likely until the Wii 2 comes out when Nintendo can release the next batch of updated third party titles over the course of a few years and whole process just repeats itself.

Who knows what new exciting ways they’ll come up with to further screw over their Australian supporters. I for one will be long gone, I intend to pickup a PS3 or Xbox 360 by mid year and go back to games that actually put up a challenge.

The Wii was supposed to bring innovation to the gaming market but instead all it’s done is drag console gaming well into the preschool demographic. On a business level I salute Nintendo for absolutely raping this market but as a gamer well, Nintendo can go to hell.

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