Hey Malstrom,
First, let me say that I love the insightful blog, keep it up! I pretty much agree with a majority of what you write; however, yes, there is a “but” to this email: It seems like you are really warming up to the Wii U with your last couple of posts, and I am kind of surprised.
You’ve made a lot of points about the capabilities of the Wii U. Some of them I agree with, and some I don’t.
For example, The fact that you can use the controllers that you already have — Wiimote used for the Wii U — is fantastic. That is a step in the right direction for Nintendo.
Other things such as the ability of the Wii U controller to allow you to play a game while you do laundry, I don’t care about at all. Going back to the definition of a game console as something I can “plug into my TV”… that’s how I feel about it. I want to use my big, expensive HDTV. If I wanted to walk around the house and play games while doing chores, I’d buy a 3DS or Vita. So my response to all the Wii U controller features is, “Who cares?”
Throughout your blog you focus mainly on Nintendo, and how Nintendo should get back to its arcade roots and expand the gaming market. Well there is one thing that really sunk into me as I watched all the press conferences this E3. I watched presenters of all of the “big three” make their cases on stage. I heard Microsoft blab on about XBOX music and voice recognition of Spanish. I observed Sony reveal its Wonderbook. I saw Nintendo shove a thousand reasons in our faces why the Wii U controller is “unique”.
To be honest it all started blending together to the point where I can barely remember which consoles offer me Netflix or browser access and which consoles don’t — or maybe all three do… I don’t know. I began to wonder what this “Electronics Entertainment Expo” is really supposed to be about and I had to do a Google search to reassure myself that this event is supposed to be about GAMES and not who is going to offer me the most comprehensive entertainment hardware.
Throughout all of this that one thing that finally sunk in is that Nintendo is no different than Sony or Microsoft. All three companies are obsessed with social connectivity and hardware. I know you think Nintendo is different than the other two companies… that because Nintendo comes from arcade roots that it is the only company of the three that can be some sort of savior of the gaming market. It’s clear from this E3 that that doesn’t matter anymore; we are so far past that now.
The consoles are supposed to be giving me access to GAMES. And there were precious few games that I am interested in from this E3. With the Wii U specifically, the only game I am interested in is 2D Mario but I am not that excited about it. You must be way more excited about it than I am if you are warming up to the Wii U so quickly. It’s just not enough to make me buy the hardware, not by a long shot. Nintendo has distorted my favorite franchises into IP shells of their former glory (Metroid and Zelda). What were the games that they featured during this spectacle? Pikmin? Scribblenauts? Nintendoland? Luigi’s Mansion? How insulting! Who the hell asked for these?! Its would be funny if it wasn’t so frustrating. Arkham City and Mass Effect 3? What am I supposed to do with ports of a bunch of older games that I can play on other consoles right at this very moment? I don’t even have faith anymore that they can get 2D Mario right…
Again, Nintendo is no different from the other two companies. It doesn’t’ matter if Nintendo has arcade roots, or if Sony and Microsoft have PC roots. All three companies are obsessed with useless Facebook-y, social connectivity, hardware gimmicks. Nintendo’s template of “Alone Together” gives us all the information we need to know. Where are the GAMES?!
Currently I own a Wii and a PS3. In the future console generations what I will be doing is choosing a console based on the game library. It will not be a “Nintendo or bust” decision. It could be a home console, a portable device, or a smart phone. I am a gamer. Just because Nintendo can’t provide me with the games that I crave, doesn’t’ mean I will give up, become disinterested.
Throughout your blog I have always inferred a “Nintendo or bust” attitude. I am here to say that it’s clear Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft are cannot be divided into “arcade” and “PC” companies anymore. There will be a little of all genres on each console.. arcade, RPG, FPS, platformer, etc… But just because I can’t play Mario or Zelda or Metroid the way I want to play it anymore doesn’t’ mean I am not giving the other companies a chance. I wanted to ask you, will you do the same? Before you buy a next gen console, can you let us readers know the six games that put you over the top and make you purchase the hardware? Right now I just get the impression you are high on 2D Mario alone… and I just don’t see it that way.
Thanks for listening. Enjoying the blog very much. Please don’t’ ever stop.
Best,
The Glorious Reader
P.S. Have you ever played Dark Souls or Demon’s Souls? I suspect not since I don’t think you have a PS3. I can honestly say that Dark Souls is probably one of my favorite games of all time right now. It is how Zelda should be made, except not so… dark. If you have the chance to play Dark Souls I suggest you borrow it from a friend and give it a try. I’d be curious to know what you think.
This email seems directed more at me than about any of the events at E3. You seem to take issue that I put Nintendo in an ‘arcade’ or ‘console’ box and put Sony and Microsoft into a ‘PC gaming’ box.
What I think you’re missing is that I am a very experienced PC gamer. I have never stopped playing PC games… ever.
In the early 1980s, game consoles tried to be PC gaming. After the crash, it was said game consoles were unnecessary because PCs could play the games that the old game consoles could. No one would even bother to sell a game console anymore. PC game companies began to rise. The king of the roost was a company by the name of Electronic Arts.
When I first saw a NES, I said: “This is stupid. PC gaming is in 16-bit and this game console is in 8-bit. No one is going to buy this thing.” What appealed to me about the NES was the lightguns because you cannot do lightuns with PC gaming. “Shoot ducks! Yeah! This is pretty cool. If this thing sells, it will be because of this.”
“No,” my friend said. “It will sell because of this,” he pointed to Super Mario Brothers.
Nintendo’s rise as well as the rebirth of the game console came about solely due to differentiation to PC gaming. Trip Hawkins, president of Electronic Arts, despised the rise of the NES. He kept telling everyone that any game console would collapse and games would remain on computers. As more and more western companies saw the NES as an additional way to make revenue, Trip Hawkins took off his shoe and slammed it during an investor’s meeting declaring that EA would not participate. The investors told him to either make NES games or he would be removed as president of the company. So EA surrendered. Nintendo of America made huge press announcements that the last hold out was finally coming to the NES.
Hawkins never got over it. He heavily invested in Nintendo’s competitor, Sega, and forced a special deal for EA by backwards engineering the Sega Genesis saying “give us a special deal or we’ll make games for your system without a license anyway.” And this was the start of Madden and the long line of EA’s sports games. The framing of the console market has remained.
You say that I am ‘Nintendo or bust’ and that I need to look at all the games. But if you realized that I am a consistent PC gamer, you can see that my disinterest with console gaming is due to no differentiation to PC gaming.
The reason why I love console gaming is because it is different from PC gaming. The NES experience could not be replicated with PC gaming despite how much people tried.
Above: The Great Giani Sisters is a Mario knockoff. One of the better selling computer games at the time. And still, it was nothing compared to the explosions going on during the NES.
I can plug my PC into a TV. Viola! Next-gen gaming! Just adapt some of the games to a controller, and I can do everything that a Sony or Microsoft box can. Except get ripped off for online fees. The PC always has more games and will always be better.
It is not debatable that Sony and Microsoft are computer companies and designed their consoles in that context. Sony Computer Entertainment, or SCE, always saw their competitor as Microsoft ever since the PlayStation 1.
Companies like Sega and Nintendo were not giant companies making computers or computer software. They were toy companies or carnival companies. No matter what is said, Nintendo cannot be directly compared to Sony and Microsoft. Nintendo is a very small business compared to Sony and Microsoft. (And it doesn’t stop Nintendo from beating them like last generation. Hahahaha. They have to be so pissed off about that.)
Why is it that everyone who says ‘look at all the games’ always leaves out PC gaming? When you add PC gaming into the equation, Sony and Microsoft consoles look like casualized dumb-boxes for people too stupid to not understand how to get into PC gaming. I suppose they deserve to pay online fees and $60 for every new game.
My PC also has better graphics than the next-gen Sony and Microsoft game console. It’s true. It does. And my online multiplayer is better than anything Xbox Live or PSN can do. It’s cheaper too.
When given the choice between PC Gaming versus PC Gaming Knock-offs, I choose the REAL THING. The intentional blurring of PC gaming and the Sony and Microsoft consoles make it appear to me that there are no game consoles there. They’re just dumbed down PCbox-connected-to-TV.
Consoles are fun because they are different from PC gaming. Something like Wii Sports could never have been done on a PC. The local multiplayer experience is also not present in PC gaming. So it is good that there is a game console out there that still acts like a game console.
I’m not a fan of being different for different’s sake, but history shows that console gaming can only exist if it differentiates itself from PC gaming.
Let’s talk game companies. The exclusive games made for the Xbox and PS were once all PC game companies. Bungie made PC games like Marathon and Myth. Epic made PC games like Unreal and Unreal Tournament. The longer these PC game companies are on the consoles, the more their gaming quality appears to drop. I really love pointing out game companies who utilized the PC correctly and how their games sell beyond anything on the game console (such as Blizzard’s games or EA’s Sims). Games like Gears of War are fun but not anything I’d want to replay like Unreal Tournament. Come to think of it, none of the PC game companies-on-consoles seem interested in making games to last. PC orientated game companies have this intention (e.g. games like Civilization) as well as oldschool arcade orientated game companies (like Nintendo).
As for things like Netflix, Nintendo is just doing something very simple which they think can add value to the product. Streaming Netflix doesn’t take any work from Nintendo. However, putting in a Blu-ray drive or a HD drive like Microsoft and Sony did does. Nintendo has no interest in taking over living room entertainment. It is, however, the stated goal of Microsoft and Sony.
What is funny is that Nintendo hasn’t really talked about what non-game entertainment (like Netflix) the Wii U will offer. Nintendo didn’t talk about Mii-verse much at the E3 conference. They talked about it during Nintendo Direct.
You say I am warming up to the Wii U. All I’m trying to do is not get caught up in conventional wisdom (since it is often wrong). The Gaming Message Forum is no oracle. I bet no one realized that this is the very first time a Nintendo game console is launched before the competition is even known. Every single Nintendo console has launched after or at the same time as the competition. So we are in new ground already. I don’t think it is fair, to any game console, to compare it to imaginary game consoles. That qualifies less as ‘warming up to the Wii U’ and more of ‘not being a hardcore idiot’.
Everyone throws buckets of cynicism at everything Nintendo is saying right now. That is fine. But in fairness, it should be pointed out that Nintendo’s competition will be trying to encourage and seed this on a scale we have not seen since the N64 launched (the Gamecube was never seen as a threat and the Wii was completely ignored and thought of as Nintendo’s last console). I don’t see that as ‘warming up to the Wii U’ but pointing out the obvious in the game console marketing business.
I would like to talk about how things were when the SNES came out. There was huge disappointment, especially from parents, that the SNES would not play NES games. But there was a craze about Mario and SNES’s launch was “OMG Super Mario Brothers 4!” F-Zero and Pilotwings were never considered much.
Super Mario World came out in a world where Sega marketing was heavily downplaying it and propping up Sonic (which seems obvious but many people forget this). There was one commercial, that I cannot seem to find, where the camera pans all the games of the SNES and quickly comes to a big red X and then goes to Genesis and shows what seems to be an infinite row of games. “Why buy a SNES now, which has no games, while the Genesis does have games?” the commercial implies. Of course, the comparison isn’t exactly fair since the SNES just launched and the Genesis had been out for a while.
I’m telling you now that the Wii U launch line up is stronger than people think. It is actually stronger than when the SNES launched. The SNES launch line up, including the third party games, ended up being a big problem for Nintendo. Nintendo was trying to put out the best gamer’s games and quickly realized it needed the mass market. This was when many of the generic SNES games came out. The SNES wasn’t selling based on sequels from the Best NES games (despite making NES players in heaven).
It is amazing how fluid the market is. You say games like Batman are old. But most Wii owners don’t own another console. They haven’t played it. Keep in mind that some of the more celebrated NES games were ports from 1983 and 1984 games. The Gamecube’s library was much richer having ports of the Dreamcast games.
Concerning launch lists, I think people forgot about how consoles like the Xbox 360 launched.
Above: Ahh, the Xbox 360 Launch Titles. Most were ports and Kameo was a Gamecube reject.
Myth making says the Wii juggernaut began after E3 2006. That is not true. While Nintendo had a good reception at E3 2006, they also had a good reception at E3 2010 (with the 3DS and look how that turned out). The Wii juggernaut didn’t start until the console launched and people could get their hands on the controller.
The 3DS looked destined to launch to a blaze of glory… but what happened? People didn’t show up to buy it. When the Wii U goes on sale is when we’ll find out the true temperature of the market. I expect it to be stronger than what the Gaming Message Forum thinks.
I have not tried Demon’s Souls. But I also have not tried out many games. Judging by the bad art style and how familiar the gameplay is (took its cue in copying old crpg games), I don’t buy into the hype. Good games will remain good years later. If people are still playing it half a decade from now, I’ll check it out. But I’ve seen this pattern before.
No games are new or novel to me. When I saw Wii Sports Tennis, I thought “PONG!”. The only novel thing I’ve seen in the last twenty years was Wii Fit of video games acting in the context of full blown fitness simulators transcending their previous cheesy attempts. Imagine my shock to one day channel surf to a fitness channel and see Wii Fit (not an ad) all over it.
A future shock I’d like to see is to walk into a business and see people play video games. Why not? Businessmen play golf. And golf is such a crappy game. Ooohhh, you can hit the little ball a far way. Who cares? You dress ridiculously and drive in a little cart. The closest I’ve ever seen to this was Wii Sports invading waiting rooms.