MediaMaster wrote on Jan 16^th, 2009 at 10:33am:


What's wrong with a bit of competition?  Nintendo is really making Microsoft and Sony earn every dollar, and I'm okay with that.


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Well, they are a business.


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That's not necessarily a bad thing.

One thing you have to keep in mind is that all of these subpar games bring in guaranteed cash, which can then be used to support newer, more experimental titles.  Every Final Fantasy sequel pays for ten The World Ends With You experiments.  Every Sonic the Hedgehog game paves the way for a MadWorld.

Besides, derivative titles can be really, really good.  Take Mario Kart, for instance.  The Wii and DS versions of the game are a heck of a lot of fun and sold like gangbusters.  Nobody cares if they are the 573,382nd iteration in the series.  As long as they continue to be unique, interesting, and fun, all the more power to Nintendo!

On the other hand, some of the new, unique, and truly interesting titles don't sell for crap.  The Square-Enix DS title I mentioned earlier, The World Ends With You, is a perfect example.  The developer took a gamble and made an incredibly unique RPG the likes of which I had never seen, and it paid off in terms of game quality.  The title was excellent and was easily one of the best handheld RPG's I had ever played (not that I play many handheld games).  It received excellent reviews and lived up to the hype.  But guess what?  It didn't sell for crap.  It only moved 140,000 copies in North America to date.

If people choose to buy derivative games of dubious quality over truly unique games with excellent production values, why even bother?  It's cheaper to license a stale property for the thousandth time, and the payoff is higher.  You can't blame anyone for making that choice, painful as it may be for us "true" gamers.


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From NPD:  "More 3rd party units were sold for Wii than any other home consoles in December for the 2nd consecutive month."

Considering the Wii has outsold the PS3 and XBox 360 combined, that shouldn't be surprising.  Nonetheless, you definitely can't say third-party titles aren't selling on the Wii.  You know they're selling well if they outsell third-party titles on the 360 and PS3, which don't have much of a first party market to begin with.


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I know of several people with Wii consoles, and most of them play the Wii regularly.  We have all three systems, and because of Meredith the Wii probably sees four or five times as much action as the other two.  I'm a hardcore PC gamer, and don't touch the consoles very often.

As you've stated, one of the biggest selling points of the Wii is the party-friendly aspect.  It is fairly rare that we don't turn the Wii on when friends come over.  Mario Kart and Super Smash Bros. Brawl are perennial favorites.

If the PS3 can harness the multimedia friendliness and network support of the 360, or if the 360 can adopt the hardware openness and free multiplayer support of the 360, the Wii might actually get some competition in terms of overall sales.  Unfortunately, neither of those seem terribly likely in this generation of consoles.


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...and I thought I was a gaming elitist!

Like I said, I'm a hardcore PC gamer and will take a PC port over a console port any day of the week.  That said, if I have to play on a console, the 360 generally wins my vote.  I abhor having to pay for multiplayer support and the ridiculously overpriced accessories (namely, the hard drive and wireless adapters) make my blood boil, but the XBox dashboard, media support, and game library beat the crap out of the PS3.

I'm not a Nintendo fanboy by any stretch of the imagination, but I think the Wii is a fun system that has carved out a "blue ocean" market for itself.  I can guarantee you that Sony and Microsoft will try to grab a piece of this market for themselves as start working on their next generation of consoles.

Competition is a good thing, and so is innovation.


-b0b
(...will always be a PC gamer at heart, though!)

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Hopefully the reviews will start trickling out soon.  Relic has become the masters of the RTS genre with Company of Heroes, so I've got high hopes for Dawn of War II.

Hopefully, this will wash away the bad taste left by "Soul Storm."  That expansion was total crap, and it is still overpriced.


-b0b
(...w0rd.)

Relic is selling the third Dawn of War expansion for 75% of through next week at $7.50.  If you pick up the expansion, you can get in on the Dawn of War II exclusive beta.

I picked up my copy a couple hours ago.  Both the expansion and the DoW 2 beta are installing now.  I'll give you guys a quick review tomorrow!


-b0b
(...can't wait to kick some Eldar butt!)

I hear they removed like most of if not all of the base building function in DoW2.

I hear its almost completly moving your soliders around now, and that a LOT of people are very displeased with this.

I had a heck of a time even getting into DoW 2 last night.  The post-install "setup" process took almost twenty minutes.  Once I got into the game, my microphone was locked open in-game even though I didn't have a microphone connected.  I had to disable the "What You Hear" port on my Soundblaster X-Fi to get it working properly.

By the time I was done with all that jazz, I just gave up and went to bed.  I'll jump on tonight and give you my impression.


-b0b
(...didn't think it looked all that much better than the latest revision of DoW.)

EQ 2...Lame.  EQ1 all the way.

I told you DoW2 was gay, all the reviews said the same thing =p

And EQ2 is not lame dumb ass =p

I would argue that EQ2 is the most balanced, well designed MMO on the market.

And I would know, actually having played all of them and not just guessing like the rest of you nubs.

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I guess this would constitute an EPIC fail!

Get it?  EPIC fail?  No?

This is a perfect example of why DRM is so incredibly irksome.  With games that require constant authentication, you're not really buying the game when you throw down your hard-earned money.  You're just renting the game until the vendor decides to take down their server.

We'll see how quickly Microsoft and Epic get their acts together.  Considering Microsoft's problem with the Zune 30GB's breaking on New Year's Eve, this appears to be an increasingly common issue for them.


-b0b
(....puts another notch on his anti-DRM belt.)