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Nintendo Criticized in Game|Life's Ten Biggest Disappointments of 2007

Dec. 22 4:03 PM by Alicia Ashby

What's interesting about this latest Game|Life feature is that it neatly sums up all of the major complaints about Nintendo (and, more specifically, the Wii) right now. It's unusual to see them summed up so, shall we say, intelligently. Two of these are from individual editors' lists, and the third... well, you'll see. Just check behind the cut.

Super Mario Galaxy. Oh look, controversy! Let me just say that I thought Galaxy was a fantastic game, and that my disappointment had more to do with the fact that I didn't like it as much as I should have. Maybe I've grown beyond being endlessly amused with mushrooms and Italian plumbers, but in light of everything else we saw this year, Galaxy seemed like more of the same from Nintendo. Yes, it physically burns when I type such things.

Wii's tiny storage space. A year ago, I honestly thought I'd finish out this year complaining about the game lineup on Virtual Console. But then something crazy happened: Nintendo actually started loading up the service with tons of games, adding more consoles and publishers faster than anyone expected. But this brought its own problems. The Wii's onboard memory is ridiculously small, and those of us who bought a lot of downloadable games quickly hit the limit. And the process of deleting games from the hard drive or copying them to an SD card is so unbearably, agonizingly complex and time-consuming that my solution has just been to buy fewer Virtual Console games.

Nintendo's new year's resolution for 2008 needs to be to let us run games off of an SD card, which would be trivial, or provide some other way of expanding the onboard memory. I don't need to remind you that in three months, they're going to debut the Wii Ware service, with full-fledged downloadable games that take up significantly more space than emulated classic games. Where they think I'm going to put them, I have absolutely no idea.

And Our Number-One Disappointment Of 2007:

Wii's third-party software lineup.

Chris: Seriously, third parties. I can forgive the fact that you came into E3 2006 having not given a second thought to what kinds of games you might make for Wii, and that meant you were going to miss Christmas '06. But after that show, you should have immediately buckled down and committed to having some top-quality games on shelves for this year's holiday. You and I both know that you're not putting nearly as much effort into your Wii software as you are with the Xbox 360/PlayStation 3 stuff, so you don't get to complain, ever, when your games don't sell as many copies. Sure, it takes some hard work and ingenuity to come up with games that hit that target demographic, but this isn't rocket surgery. (Note to self: make a quick cash-in budget title for Wii, call it Rocket Surgery, get the interns to code it up next week.)

Susan: The Wii's popularity proved to be a double-edged sword for gaming in general. True, it introduced an entirely new audience to the joys of gaming, but a seemingly unending stream of publishers ported whatever they had on hand in an effort to cash in on the console's success. This amount of shovelware hasnt been seen since the omnipresence of the Atari 2600, which leads us to wonder, what Wii title will find its way to a New Mexico landfill?

Earnest: I think it's awesome that the Wii is selling so well, expanding the industry and everything Reggie keeps telling us they're doing. But with a library comprised of 95% horrible crap, are we expanding the industry in the right direction?

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