I can’t stop laughing. Gamers, everywhere, are high fiving each other because we’re sick and tired of the marketing pony show. It’s understandable why things are kept secret and there is desire to announce the news at a proper time, but everything feels so canned.
I am referring to the leaked Rayman Wii U video that showcases a new Wii U ability. The ability is Near Field Communication in which the Wii U controller can sense objects in close proximity to it. The Rayman Wii U trailer has players place things on the controller that makes stuff happen in the game.
My God, it’s full of… certainly not stars.
Let’s get the other stuff out of the way first. The Rayman game looks bad, very bad. I am convinced video game companies no longer play their games. They just do things like ‘social gaming’, throw that in, and do not actually play it outside of normal development purposes. Rayman Wii U will sell worse than Rayman Origins did. Yuck.
The Wii U, if the trailer is accurate, seems to have no change with it. It is just one controller per console that is not wireless. To play multiplayer, other players must use the Wii-motes. It still uses the same Wii and DS Lite white color tone as if that impresses anyone anymore. (Ubisoft released a statement saying that the trailer was for internal use and the hardware does not represent the final Wii U hardware. Who cares? If that is the case, they are going to spend more money to make the actors play with the ‘actual’ system which may or may not be the case. I am not up to date on marketing within the big game companies.)
I kept thinking of Back to the Future when I heard the music. Don’t know if it is the same exact music or something similar.
Nintendo’s behavior is that they always leave a feature unrevealed when they first announce their game hardware. The features that are shown are features that cannot be hidden. It would have been impossible to hide the Wii mote’s motion control ability while have third party game development go on with it. And Nintendo had to say what the ‘Revolution’ was. With the Wii, the hidden feature was the speaker in the controller as well as WiiConnect 24/7.
So I am 100% certain that Nintendo will reveal a new ‘feature’ or two with the Wii U that they have not revealed before. Near Field Communication, certainly being shown in the trailer, has all the hallmarks of something Nintendo would put in. It is a cheap technology that is becoming more and more widespread. It is rumored to be included in the iPhone 5.
Nintendo lives in a fantasy land where they believe they are a technology company (instead of an entertainment company). Nintendo honestly thinks companies like Google and Apple are their peers. Iwata certainly believes he is helping ride the Internet technology wave with this!
Remember when Nintendo said they used to be about games? Yeah. Nintendo is more interested in how we play games instead of why we play them.
If Nintendo ran a movie theater, they would be showing the same old movies but in new ways. They would have ‘rumble’ where the theater seats would shake. They would have 3d pop-o-vision where the old movies are now in 3d. They would offer motion sensing for the audience. But they don’t seem interested in making a continuity of more great movies. Everything about the Wii U, as well as the 3DS, is so boring.
Here is a video for Near Field Communication:
But how could Near Field Communication work with a television set? Here is your answer:
While people make fun of the actors in these gaming commercials, keep in mind that these actors are chosen specifically because they look like what the actual gamers are.
That is not a super model or a male underwear model. The guy is close to a neckbeard and the girl has the same black glasses as I’ve seen other gaming girls be. The marketing angle is that they hope gamers will see themselves in these people. Marketers should take a lesson from the NES marketing where they showed He-man type actors or extremely handsome rich looking men playing video games. The reason why the TV show ‘Freaks and Geeks’ failed is because real life people are not interesting.
“What about the ‘Wii Would Like to Play’ commercials? They showed off real people and the Wii was a huge success.”
But no one identified with the gamers in those commercials. They identified with the nice Japanese men who went from house to house sharing gaming joy. Why do you think the Wii spread so fast? Gamers were actually acting out those Japanese men in going ‘Wii would like to play’ in order to get their families and friends to play.
This Near Field Communication reminds me of the ‘barcode’ gaming Nintendo did in the early 80s in Japan. If you brought a barcode and scanned it into the system, you would get a different character or something like that. I wasn’t impressed with it then and I’m not impressed with it now. Who wants to buy a bunch of statues to get the most out of a video game?
“But what about the touch screen mechanics shown in the video?” Extremely lame. I would get a more satisfying experience playing NES Stack-Up with ROB. At least Gyromite had kickass music.
The reason why the Wii was so exciting was that it was an indicator that Nintendo wanted to recapture the magic of the Classic Era of gaming which Sony and Microsoft cannot understand. The Wii almost resembled a NES as did the controller. It was simple. It had arcade like games. The DS also got people excited when you compared the simple and fun games of the DS to the PSP.
The Wii U will not excite people the same way the Wii did because Wii U is not an indication that Nintendo wants to move in that direction. It is also why putting out more 2d Mario may not perform its magic anymore.
I feel like Nintendo has become a valley of yes-men trapped within an alternate reality where they believe game console sales revolve around ‘surprise’ and ‘integrated hardware and software’ where the history doesn’t support this.
The Wii U will certainly reveal Nintendo’s true intentions with the Wii. What it looks like is that Nintendo was not so much interested in the Wii satisfying people who rejected their prior systems but to manipulate them in order to play the games they wanted to make. For example, see the 3d Mario fiasco. Super Mario Galaxy was made so people that were ‘scared of 3d’ (Nintendo’s point of view) would embrace it. They tried again with Galaxy 2 and even put in an ‘instructional video’ about how to play the game. And then we have the 3DS which is ‘3d in your face’. The Wii U is definitely a move for Nintendo to take control of the visual output of the home game consoles. Why? Likely so they can ram more 3d crap at us since 3d televisions are not selling (as Iwata publicly expressed his disappointment).
Market research shows that many people find the standard game controller with its analogue sticks to be scary (which is why the Wii controller was made). So why is Nintendo returning to a similar control scheme? The answer is with the Circle Pad. I believe Nintendo thinks the Circle Pad will make the controller seem ‘less scary’.
Do you know why I am a non-gamer, Nintendo? It is because instead of making games I want to play, you keep making games you wish to develop. Why do I have to wait decades for a new 2d Mario? And WTF was with Metroid: Other M?
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