OMG Nintendo.com

So I find this article pretty interesting, although I disagree with some of it. Anyway, what's relevant is the praise author James Portnow heaps on Metroid Prime 3:

How can we make a good shooter on the console?

This question has been asked a thousand times and been answered in a thousand ways but, until now, the answer has never seemed to satisfy. This is largely due to the fact that when people ask How do we make a good shooter on a console what they really mean is how do we make a shooter that feels as quick and responsive as a PC shooter on the console.

Apparently the answer is the Wii mote. I was blown away by this fact. Nintendo had always been the family friendly console to me so I didnt consider the FPS ramifications of the Wiimote but clearly its the best tool for the job. With some tweaking and some refinement down the line I could see the Wii (or a console with Wii like controls) becoming the platform of choice for hardcore FPSers, even over the PC. If this does become the case it will owe it all to Metroid Prime 3.

Hmm. I can't quite see it, myself...

Medal of Honor Heroes 2 may not be a trailblazing game, but it's one of the first third-party Wii shooters to really hit a sweet spot with use of the Wiimote. IGN talked the game's Lead Designer and Producer, Matt Tomporowski, into writing up a post-mortem that discussed the dev team's struggle to come up with controls that felt just right.

Although we aspired to create awesome controls from the beginning, we actually started out with a false assumption. We assumed that our game would likely ship with two control schemes, one called "Elite", intended for hardcore FPS gamers, and another that we called "Easy" that would be used by casual gamers. We got to work and we found it actually very difficult to come up with a so called "Easy" control scheme and you'll notice that in the end we didn't actually ship a control scheme called Easy in our final game! Ultimately, we learned that we would need to take much more dramatic steps with our controls (and game modes) if we were going to make an experience that was easy for casual Wii gamers to pick up and play.

Another accolade for the Wii, this time from the estimable tech site CNet. Now, pay careful attention to those numerical rankings: notice the Wii comes behind virtually everything except the DS, GBA SP, and GB Micro! Of course, the full text of the Wii's review is still mostly positive, despite a long list of niggling complaints. So... what are the numbers even for? At the end of the day, it seems that the Wiimote trumps everything anyway.

Anyway, here's a direct link to their DS coverage, if you're interested. I'm not going to bother with the GBA SP or GB Micro evaluations, because I can't think of why anyone would buy one of those now that the DS is on the market (aside from excessive cheapness).