New Game Overthinker!

That's great and all for you gaming connoisseurs but when your customers have grown to teen/early 20s you're probably not going to be winning them all over with Banjo Kazooie when they could be playing Metal Gear Solid or Gran Turismo or something.

Basicly WWF went a very long time with no competition at all. Then Ted Turner randomly decided "I want me some of that wrasslin stuff!" and bought a wrestling company. Turning it into WCW. At first it was very very bad even by wrestling standards, but Ted had tons of money to throw at it even more then Vince ever could hope to do with WWF. So he started playing dirty and hiring the big name guys off of WWF. Which led to WWF getting absolutely destroyed for awhile. But getting dominated like that actually forced Vince to try for the first time in like ever. But that's where the comparison would really end because once Vince started fighting back it became apparent that WCW was run by a bunch of corporate morons who had no idea what they were doing and it fell apart.

You could easily say Sony did the same thing to Nintendo. Sony forced them to actually try instead of just rest on their laurels.

Yet New Super Mario Bros Wii is the top selling game of 2010... and it came out in 2009.

I'd add a qualifier to this, in japan, whoever square supported was in the lead. In the us square laregly played to a niche audience, of which i was a part, heck, we didnt even get half of square's games, no bahamut lagoon, no seiken densetsu 3, we didnt even get tenchi sozo from enix, and we couldnt import the uk version because that one was pal and wouldnt play on an ntsc system. in the us fortunes in the 16 bit era largely hinged on one key game. the original mortal kombat. nintendo's decision to release a graphically superior but censored version cause a massive outcry in the pre-internet days, and led to genesis recieving a lot of positive press for their stand against censorship. also, the genesis launched well before the nes, and were sucessfully able to cast nintendo as lagging technologically, partially due to a completely made-up feature, blast processing. The irony was that the nintendo actually could usually display superior graphics due to the genesis' weaker color palette. Sega also tended to have a stronger sports game roster for the us market.
Eventually Nintendo did pull ahead in units sold, but that was only after genesis had been abandoned and the saturn made its ill fated belly flop on store shelves (i got one, the made a series about dragons..i didnt have much choice in the matter, plus to heck with the haters, astal was pure art) .

one thing bob neglected to go into about who won the war, and let me tell you, financials be damned, sega was actually seen as a legitimate competitor even with the bellyflop, was 2d vurses 3d. sony aggressively pushed for 3d games, and their system was designed to play 3d games well, sega ports were always lackluster. conversely, the saturn had amazing 2d capabilities, but its 3d was, as i said above, blah. i think bob undersold the importance of controlling the battlefield, had sega been able to force a war on sprites, layers of parallax and a really kickbutt 2d game, sony would have done far worse, but sony won the day with advancing in the gamers consciousness that polygons, not sprites were the future. I vaguely remember the tipping point being a combination of resident evil and tomb raider that won the war, but i could be off. pre internet we had only game mags to go by, and diehard gamefan was about as neutral as pravda.

some of us missed sprites, and really like how the dlc/handheld war now is about well made sprite games again.

Saturn still is the system with two of my all time favorite games. Dragon Force and Guardian Heroes.

But what is the demographic for that game? (I honestly have no idea) What Nintendo did right this time is market the Wii to people who would impulse buy it for the waggle stick and aren't really in to gaming traditionally. I'd also venture to guess that the original Nintendo generation are reaching an age where they have their own kids and want something to play with them. My argument is that it's a time sensitive issue, you can't extrapolate data from today and assume it would be true in the mid 90s.

I hate to admit you might have a point. The Super Mario 3 nostalgia wouldn't have been as strong back then since the game would have been to recent.

He doesn't. He's using ideas that were revealed for their utter stupidity back in 2008 to make a line of thought that's like a pod person made from a good point. Long story short, $200 is not an impulse buy, the best games on the Wii barely use the Wiimote, and games like Mario are why I try to remind people that the "E" stands for "Everyone" for a damn good reason. Just because it's appropriate for young people doesn't suddenly mean that they're the only ones who are supposed to enjoy it. And SMB3 nostalgia has been running strong since the SNES was released (and has been measurable as such since the internet hit its stride).

Can you link me to this evidence that proves i'm wrong? Anecdotally i know a bunch of people who bought a Wii because Wii Sports looked fun then they didn't really buy anything else except Mario because they remember Mario being fun. That's also how my sister got hers, from some woman trying to sell it off because she got bored of Wii Sports and Mario Galaxy.

Anecdotally.

ME!

I bought the Wii at release for Super Smash Bros. Brawl wasn't meant to be that far off in Europe...it finally arrived two years later!

I've tried stuff like Mad World (which was terribly boring and Mature label seems to suggest purely T&A and gore, so teenage, not mature), No More Heroes 1 and 2 (enjoyed both), Monster hunter (amazingly hard but rewarding), Mario Kart (a party favorite), Mario Bros and Mario Galaxy 1.

The Wii does have some amazing games and I regret selling it because I want to play Mario Galaxy 2 damn it...since it is an E for Everyone game but a friend told me it is even more awesome than the original.

Actually, I could see the release of 360 and PS3 motion controls as helping Nintendo score more 3rd party support. Right now, one of the big detriments to supporting motion control is that means it can only be played on the Wii. For some gaming studios, that means significantly less sales than if they were to release a cross-platform game as every console owner would have access to their game rather than just the one.

When the Kinect and Move release, this potentially allows for a developer to have cross-platform motion control games. This not only would help Nintendo in getting 3rd party support but might also have the advantage of getting some games released on the Wii that might not otherwise be due to them being aimed more at adults.

The problem with that logic is that the graphical limitations of the Wii are only slightly above PS2 and far below what the 360 and PS3 put out. This creates development problem of having to choose Wii only or 360 and PS3 only. Also the 3 systems use entirely different motion control systems making multi-platiforming games across them a major pain.

There are already a number of games that are done across all three platforms, with the Wii's graphics obviously lower (the PS3 and 360's graphics typically differ as well). I wouldn't think that would be a huge concern as adjusting the detail of graphics isn't terribly difficult. Computer games are a good example of that. It's just that consoles lock you into the optimal setting for the system.

As far as the motion controls go, not being familiar with either the Move or Kinect, I suppose it's difficult for me to make a judgment on how easy or difficult it would be to make a motion control game available on all systems. However, I would speculate it'd be a lot easier to create a game and adjust it for each of the different types of motion controls rather than how it works now where a game either has to add or remove motion controls to make the game work on all three consoles.

Of course, there is also the fact that with motion controls being available on every console, it makes it open to a much broader audience. It will no longer be niche (or, at least, not as niche), which might push some developers more in the direction of being willing to embrace it. This, too, could be something that could be beneficial to the Wii as it may remove some of the stigmas that currently exist towards it.

You're right! Hannah Montana: The Movie: The Game was across all systems. Boy are we thankful for that!

Or maybe Marvel:Ultimate Alliance?

I saw that as more something they were doing because we were just coming out of the PS2 era and they couldn't sacrifice the sales they would get on that system.

What is that even supposed to mean? M:UA was on all three next-gen consoles, with the Wii version having noticeably less-good graphics. Pretty cut and dry.

It was far more than just 3 consoles...Game Boy Advance, Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Portable, Wii, Xbox, Xbox 360. GBA version being vastly different as it was a 2D sidescroller.

My point was since they were putting it on the PS2 (largely because next gen systems were new and they knew they had potential customers with the PS2), there was already a graphically weaker version of the game being made. Infact there are a lot of games that are cross plattform on the PS2 and the Wii even now. Because they are closer in graphical capability, meanwhile cross platform with Wii and other next gen systems... not so much.

Or the Madden franchise, or The Force Unleashed, or the Rock Band series, or Ghostbusters, or Call of Duty, or Prince of Persia, etc.

But the Wii version looks a lot better than the PS2 version.