Saturday, January 31, 2009

They all need better games

My cousin (who needs to update his freaking blog sometime) passed along this article entitled, "The Wii needs better games now."

While I don't usually trust people in the mainstream media to write about such matters, I can't disagree with the premise of the article. The Wii is suffering from a drought of good content. Sure, there's fun stuff to download on Wii Ware, but the last full game I bought was Mario Kart, and that was almost a year ago. When I go to the stores, the shelves are full, but full of what? Crappy movie or TV tie-ins, animal sims, pet sims, "girl" games, silly sport games . . . it's like a wasteland of entertainment. Nintendo's own products are considered the best, but the last thing they produced was Wii Music, a product I doubt will light the world on fire. My DS suffers from the same problem.

Still, I can't merely fault the Wii for this. Most other consoles are also under the curse of a lack of creativity. It's a field full of sport franchises, endless sequels, and remakes of games that didn't need them. Where are the games with memorable characters and good writing?

If you're a Wii owner, what have you bought in the last year that you liked, or what are you looking forward to?

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I bought Call of Duty: World at War for Wii b/c my sister in Manchester England said it was good. Now my sister is a very casual gamer and sorta just played my games and consoles growing up for something to do. That being said I was skeptical about how good CoD:WaW ACTUALLY was for a bit more serious gamer like myself.

I couldn't have been more happy. This game is to Wii owners what Halo 3 was to XBox 360 owners: it's addictive, has great graphics (realistic and not all childish and cutesy looking like most Wii games). If you are an older gamer and are jealous of those PS3 and XBox 360 owners that have all the 'cool grown up games', you gotta pick up CoD.

I also play online with my sister and her bf and there's no lag even tho she's across the ocean! How cool!

Anonymous said...

I think the last Wii game I bought was Smash Bros. Brawl and that was when it first came out. I played it a lot but I haven't touched it in months. My Wii isn't even plugged into my TV right now. I find I can only enjoy the Wii in a large group people. A group of people with mixed video game skill sets. Warioware Smooth Moves is a great party game for everyone.

I play my xbox 360 much much more often and I buy games for it all the time. The system has a more appealing game line up for the hardcore gamer. Yes there are a lot of FPSs but have you played Bioshock or Gears of War 2 or Halo 3 for that matter? They are excellent games. There is a lot of shovelware on all systems but the xbox 360 is really meant for people like you and me, not the Wii. Oh and I just got Fallout 3 which has been great so far.

EbMarie83 said...

Though I haven't completely explored all the game, I enjoy Wii Music. Coming from a music teacher, this is kind of a big endorsement. It's not perfect, and there are a few things that frustrate me, but overall, it was very well thought out and offers a great deal of variety to appeal to individual musical proficiencies.