Let's have a little break from the Leipzig rush to talk about something that could herald a very significant shift in the industry's flow of cash. I don't talk about licensed games here often because they're very rarely interesting as, well, things to play. Early previews are making the Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince game sound pretty decent, but not enough so I'd take interest. What does make me take interest is this revelation from MTV Multiplayer, to the effect that the Wii is the lead platform for EA's latest Harry Potter multi-platform extravaganza.
We made that decision from day one, [executive producer Jonathan Bunney] told me last week. We did, I think, a good job with the Wii last year, but were doing a great job this year. Because this is where the casual audience is, the mass audience is here. Its a great control system, but youve got to learn to use it.
EA wants as many people as possible playing their Harry Potter games and Bunney saw the traditional control scheme as an obstacle for many users.
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Hey, does that look familiar? Why, I bet it does. This flagrant Wii Remote clone is called the Stix. Published and developed by GoLive2, it's designed as a PC game peripheral. Patrick Klepek at MTV Multiplayer has the inside scoop on it:
There will be two Stix controllers at launch, the 200 ($39.99) and the 400 ($49.99) models. The 200 is designed for 2D gaming, while the 400 will support fully 3D games, too. For example, while it sounds unwieldy, we were told you could load World of Warcraft and map 16 buttons across the two controllers.
The real potential in the Stix controller isn't in the controller's mapping onto complex 3D action games like Crysis, though, but to add intuitive motion controls to the breadth of freely available 2D and 3D games already the web. GoLive2 will launch a free, ad-supported web portal. Technically, the site is already live, but the controllers won't arrive until August.
An expensive controller for free games? It might fly with parents who don't want to spend money on a Wii, but do have a PC.
Flash games you can play on your Wii is something I've covered before, though not in any great amount of depth-- there's just too much out there, and much of it is too crappy for me to really devote a lot of mental energy toward playing.
Perhaps with an eye toward helping the growing number of Wii Flash game makers improve their craft, McGraw-Hill-- yeah, those guys who publish textbooks-- has published The Nintendo Wii Flash Game Creator's Guide. Written by Todd Perkins of the Chad and Todd Adobe Podcast, the guide starts out by going over Flash basics and then gets into the subject of how to design games specifically to be played with the Wii Remote.
Every time I work on a big console guide project something stays welded into my DS to play for "decompression" purposes. Usually it's a light RPG of some kind, occasionally an action game. For the past month, it's been... Crosswords DS. Yeah, look, I don't know.
There's not much music or graphic pizazz to this game; you hold the DS in "book" format and write letters into the puzzle to solve it, just as if you were doing a crossword on paper.The cart holds at least 650 puzzles in crossword mode alone, ranging from easy to hard. Your easy puzzles can be solved in less than five minutes, most of the time, while hard puzzles usually take around 20 minutes. The varying difficulty levels ensure basically anyone can play the game, and the clues are pretty good. All told you get a better value-per-puzzle from Crosswords DS's $20 cart than you would buying 600 puzzles worth of crossword collections at your average supermarket.
Why the hell do I care so much about this game? Why can't I stop playing it? I don't ordinarily like crossword puzzles all that much. They remind me too much of that weird grandma's house smell, old newsprint and Endust.
Crosswords DS
Hardcore gamers complain about the Wii a lot, and sometimes for good reason. Their most serious complaint is that the Wii is a terrible system for online play, and... well, you know, it is. Friend codes and extra codes for individual games? That's really just ridiculous.
Anthony Swinnich at GamersMark has nailed what's so infuriating about Nintendo's insistence on online baby steps: Nintendo in many ways originated the party game style that modern multiplayer games draw on with Rare's Goldeneye 007. Why won't they focus on multiplayer games now?
The Nintendo 64 had a unique advantage in the 90s it was the only system with four controller ports. ... That made the N64 the natural leader and system of choice for developers looking to create a multiplayer experience. The Wiis unique control possibilities could be an advantage if used correctly, but Nintendos current online scheme does little to make use of that. How much fun would a worldwide Wii Sports tournament have been?
One of the selling points of Super Smash Bros. Brawl was that it was supporting a whopping four different control schemes, in tune with the Wii's massive emphasis on control gimmicks. You have Wii Remote Style, Nunchuck Style, Classic Style, and GameCube Style. You'd think which one was best was just a matter of personal preference, right?
Well, no. Much like Geometry Wars Galaxies, Brawl is a game where not all of its control systems are equally up to the task of, you know, working. GamesRadar did a fairly detailed breakdown of all four control schemes, and came up with this (paraphrased) ranking of crappiest to bestest:
- Worst: Nunchuk Style
- Crappy: Wii Remote Style
- Okay: Classic Style
- Awesome: GameCube Style
The problem seems to be that it's either impossible or very difficult to execute throws using any controller but the GameCube's. If so, this is pretty depressing to me. I'm no fan of the GameCube controller. I was really hoping the Classic could triumph here.
Super Smash Bros. Brawl
Here's something to spend today thinking about. The New York Times took a look at the ten best-selling titles for 2007 and found only one, Assassin's Creed, that was a traditional hardcore title. The rest? Mass-market social games like Guitar Hero and Wii party games.
Wii Play was the No. 2-selling game of last year even though it received an abysmal score of 58 out of 100 at Metacritic.com, which aggregates reviews. Mario Party 8 for the Wii made the list at No. 10 with a similarly bad Metacritic rating of 62. Both Wii Play and Mario Party 8 are basically collections of mini-games, like table tennis, portrayed through simple graphics. To someone steeped in game lore, that's pretty lame. To someone who just bought a Wii for the family, that's pretty cool.
What's interesting is that NYT takes this as a sign that games as a medium are finally maturing, pointing out that critical darlings are rarely sales darlings when it comes to movies, TV, or books. This is still an ugly situation for hardcore games, which tend to demand bigger budgets than more casual titles. If they can't make a return on investment, then it's inevitable that fewer will be produced.
Here's something you may be wondering if you got a new Wii for Christmas and your batteries are just starting to die out. Just how quickly does the Wii Remote chew through batteries, anyway? My benevolent overlords at GamePro decided to test it and the other two wireless console controllers out, and the results are pretty interesting.
The Wii Remote and Nunchuck are the most technologically advanced controllers on the market. Given that the pair include speakers, gyroscopes, and other motion-sensing doohickery, we assumed the waggle pads would be the first to cave when it came to battery performance. Surprisingly, Wii controllers lasted almost 20 hours longer than the PS3 controller when playing games, watching YouTube videos, or admiring handsome Miis. At the end of the day, the Wii CopperTops tarried for a solid 36 hours and 43 minutes on default controller settings.
The award for longest battery life went to the Xbox 360 controller, which isn't too surprising. Those things can last forever on a charge.
Wired's GeekDad has blogged up today with a story that is, in its own way, absolutely amazing. Faced with a malfunctioning Wii remote, the Dad tried everything he could to get it working before trying to call tech support. There he got a piece of advice that's like something out of a sitcom.
So, I exhausted all the options for getting a remote to work given on the Nintendo support site and called (with gritted teeth) the customer service line...two days after Christmas. I expected the worst.
I was surprised. A very pleasant lady took my call within one minute of getting through the push-button maze to get to Wii Remote troubleshooting.
I explained what the problem was and what I had tried. She then asked me to check one more thing - the Wii Sensor - which checked out. Then the conversation went something like this:
Friendly Nintendo Help Desk Lady: "Okay - I want you to take the remote, button side down and smack it into the palm of your hand two or three times."
According to GeekDad, this actually worked, too. Something to keep in mind if your Wiimote is on the fritz, I suppose.
I try to keep the number of Wii 'miracle stories' on this site down to avoid getting too treacly (or repetitive), but this story is something special. Taylor Smith has a degenerative muscle illness called arthrogryposis, which means virtually no muscles in her arms. This makes doing a lot of things most of take for granted, well, hard. Video games, for instance? Impossible.
Until now.
He used four hair ties to attach the console's controller to Taylor's arm and she was away.
The success prompted Mr Watkins to write to Nintendo [of Australia] for help, which came in the form of a new console delivered to the Smith family's Corio home for free.
Taylor and her siblings happily played with their new console yesterday.
She could barely wipe the smile off her face and neither could anyone else.
"This is the first time she has been able to play electric games with her family and it's great to see her smile," Mr Watkins said.
Moral of the story: Wii Sports does magic things.
- << prev
- next >>
