InferNO?

At E3, people were outside protesting Dante's Inferno, a game based on the first part of Dante's Divine Comedy. With pithy slogans like, "Trade in your PlayStation for a PrayStation" and "EA = Electronic Anti-Christ," these picketers seemed a little too clever to be actually picketing. And, lo and behold, it was a fake campaign to drum up interest for an otherwise uninteresting game. Oh well. In the age of MySpace and iPhones, sometimes companies have to resort to old-school hate mongering to garner attention. Even the fact that it was a fake publicity stunt is getting EA more publicity! Media is fun.

Not better than the original

A sequel should keep the good parts of the first game, throw out the bad, and add new features, making the core experience even more enjoyable. Final Fantasy IV: The After Years does not do this.

This WiiWare exclusive takes all the old graphics, charm, and mechanics, and adds MORE random battles. I spent the entire first hour of playtime on the first dungeon (which was only two floors) because I had to fight a random monster every four steps. Just to be sure that it wasn't like this before, I popped in my old copy of Final Fantasy II (the American title for IV) on SNES, my newer copy of FF4 on the PlayStation, and I even tried my copy of FF4 on Game Boy Advance, and, sure enough, there were a LOT more battles in this Wii one. Battles aren't intrinsically uninteresting, but these particular battles have been the same for fifteen years. They're stale. The one new feature in battles, Band Attacks, has already been used in numerous other games, most recently in Sonic Chronicles on the DS. Two or more characters team up for one attack, making a stronger attack, but depriving both characters of the necessary MP. Woo.

This game would be great on a cell phone, where it was originally released, as long as there was a quicksave option. As it is... The After Years takes great characters from one of history's most beloved series and gives them one more adventure. But that's all. Square is treading a long-beaten path, and their storytelling had better be nothing less than sublime for them to expect anyone to complete this game and invest in the downloadable content. There's a difference between pure, brutal nostalgia (Mega Man 9) and a shamless cash-in like this, despite Square bringing back the cast that worked on the original game to make this pseudo-sequel. Their love of the past cannot be denied. This game can be.


...Of course this is all just based on the first hour of playtime. If I ever find myself going back to it, I'll be sure to let you know if there is any change in how I feel about it.

Llama out.

Guess who's back... back again... Dreamcast's back... tell a friend

First ThinkGeek was selling them (and it looks like they just got another shipment! $100!). Now Amazon is. Brand new Sega Dreamcast. $120 with free shipping. Sure, it could have benefited from waiting to hit the market a few months (at least) but now it's gone. Yet people are still making Dreamcast games, and there are still servers running for four different games, including Quake III: Arena. Hope you have a land line and a 56k connection! Nothing like a stroll down retro lane to muster up some sympathy for the little company Sony killed.

Also, if you get one, make sure you get copies of Seaman and Jet Grind Radio. Two classics that deserved a better fate than they received. I'm still waiting for the localized PS2 version of Seaman 2... Come on Japan! And don't forget Leonard Nimoy!

Wow.

This is the first year that I've actually followed E3 as it was happening, and, compared to what I've read in magazines after the fact from other years (Wii Music... Yay.), this may have been the coolest year ever.

Why? Project Natal.

Video Games | Project Natal | E3 09: Project Natal Intro

XBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii

Incredible. I hope it works as promised.

And this is my first video embed, and I'm not an HTML tag expert yet... so sorry it covers up the other stuff on the side. But this must be seen by everyone. It's the future. You know, if M$ can make it work.

Do games NEED multiplayer?

If you want to be able to play one game and one game only for the next year of two of your life, then yes, multiplayer is a necessity. Sure, there are single-person experiences that seem limitless (Spore, The Sims, Tetris) but eventually you need something more. Why do you think the Sims have had expansion after expansion after expansion? In today's A.D.D. world of YouTube and an MTV that has lost it's "M," people need constant, updated stimulation. Online multiplayer is one easy way to accomplish this.

Call of Duty 4, Halo 3, and Call of Duty: World at War - the top three online games on 360. They will remain this way for the forseeable future. CoD 4's single player was great - the scripted action was intense, the characters were believable, and the sense of immersion in the battles was unparalleled. Yet, there is no reason to play it more than once. The experience will always be the same, no matter the difficulty level you select. But online, you can meet new people, and shoot new people. The experience will never be scripted; the experience will never be the same. Online multiplayer has helped WoW become a pop culture phenomenon, and one that's doesn't show any sign of letting up. A game can be fun, but without online multiplayer, there is no reason to keep getting better and better indefinitely. If you invested 200 hours into Final Fantasy XII to get yourself the sweetest, toughest party in RPG history, who will know? Who will care? I sunk 120 hours into Oblivion, and now it just sits on the shelf, collecting dust. At least I got all 1,250 achievement points!

A distant cousin to online multiplayer is the increasing availability of online leaderboards. Rock Band, Mirror's Edge, Mega Man 9, N+, basically every other XBLA game... by getting people to compete with each other to shave half a second off a speed run, single player games are given incredible long term vitality. Mega Man 9 came out months ago, and people are still competing for the top spot on the leaderboards. How many full-budget games can make that claim? Not as many as would like to, that's for sure.

"Give me more money!" - Nintendo

So I downloaded Final Fantasy IV: The After Years on WiiWare today, and I was pretty pumped. Until I found out that to get the whole game, you have to download $3/each episodes that will come out at the rate of about 3 a month for the next 3 months or so... turning my $8 game (great deal) into a $30 game (not as great). Still, it's Final Fantasy 4 for the next generation, so I won't complain too much. But couldn't I have just paid the World of Goo price of $15 and gotten the whole game at once? Nintendo is doing this online thing all wrong. They're taking all the bad parts of online play (nickel and diming the gamers to death) and ignoring all the good stuff (why doesn't Punch-Out!! have online mulitplayer?).

Still, it's a cell phone game ported to the Wii that will eventually cost me about $30 if I want the complete experience. I'm buying... guess I'm a fanboy. Oh well.

Riding the Zelda short bus

Third-person action/adventure games - the most derivative of all game genres. No matter how good/unique your game is, critics and the public will all declare it "like Zelda." It seems like the only way to escape the Zelda stigma is to include guns in your game (Ratchet & Clank).

Example: Okami. PS2's answer to Zelda. You got to be a wolf, there was a silent protagonist, you ran errands for villagers, you explored dungeons. Sounds like Zelda. Sure, there was a painting mechanic, and a cool art-style, but nobody cared except the critics. This game single-handedly closed Clover Studios.

Example: Beyond Good and Evil. Third-person adventure, hit bad guys with a stick, similar controls, pretty female protagonist (HA take that, Link!). The setting was unique, and the story was interesting, and the characters had... character. But the game felt like Zelda, even though there were no dungeons to explore or princesses to rescue. The photography aspect was cool too. Nobody played this game either.

More examples: Malice, Haven: Call of the King, Jak and Daxter, Dark Cloud, Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee, Psychonauts, Fable. All of these games have aspects that help separate themselves from Zelda's shadow, but many feel like that's all they do. Zelda with a hammer, Zelda with psychic powers, Zelda with experience points, Zelda with farts. Zelda wasn't the first, but it did it the best. I don't know if it will ever be topped by cookie-cutter games.

One thing's for sure, however: when (if?) a unique game comes along that turns the Zelda gameplay on its ear, I'll be the first in line to pick it up. With so many "me too" games flooding the market, I could really go for a breath of fresh air.

Guess who won the Punch-Out!! tournament?

This guy.

Here are my prizes: the poster announcing the tourney, a sweet bumper sticker I'll stick on my car after I finally wash it, and a Little Mac T-shirt, black, size XL. Which I will never take out of the bag because someday it'll be worth all money. Then I can sell it and buy a Ferrari! Aw, dreams.

So what if nobody else showed up? That doesn't mean I didn't train until 3 a.m. this morning! I was ready to use those gimmicky (yet still kinda cool) motion controls to lay down a whoopin' on any 10-year-olds in my way.

+2 experience for being in the right place at the right time.

Unappreciated Fantasy

Final Fantasy VIII - the most unappreciated Final Fantasy. But why? After the juggernaut of FFVII, it seemed like nothing short of the second coming of Jesus could compare to the masterpiece that preceded VIII. It had the same futuristic setting, but the characters were made to look more realistic. The graphics were much better overall, and the characters had similarly charming personalities and flaws.

The biggest polarizing aspect for fans was undoubtedly the Draw system. Instead of MP, you would Draw your magic from enemies. Harder enemies = stronger spells. You could then fuse your magic to your stats, making you resistant to fire, for example. If you wanted mega-stats, you would simply draw magic from enemies, over and over and over and over. Some people dug the customizable potential it afforded, most people hated the repetitiveness.

My favorite part (and biggest time suck) was the Triple Triad card game. You could play cards with pretty much everyone in the game, winning cards when you win, and losing cards when you lose. It was supremely addictive, and it was one of the main reasons I never actually finished the game. I was too obsessed with getting every card... way more fun than Pokemon. They tried to recreate the card mini-game experience in FFIX, but it just didn't have the same soul. It became too random, and felt more like Risk than a card game, where a lucky roll of the dice could mean a small army destroys a much bigger army 300 style. You can still play the Triple Triad card game online here.

Final Fantasy VIII was also one of the very, very few U.S. games that was PocketStation compatible. Remember that thing? Sony's first foray into the handheld market was this Tamagotchi-esqe monochrome VMU. It never came out stateside, but I imported one just to play it with FFVII. (I thought it would work with Street Fighter Alpha 3, too, but they took that compatibility out in the localization... jerks.) You plug the PocketStation into your memory card slot and download the game onto it. You could play this mini-game, called Chocobo World, I think, to level up your Chocobo summon to god-like status. It was pretty simple. You'd cruise your chocobo around a giant square world map to certain points where you'd battle a cactuar by pushing the buttons really fast, leveling up as you did. At level 50, you see a cutscene and your summon would become stronger. At level 100, my PocketStation glitched and I didn't get the 2nd cutscene. But you can't level up any higher... so I stopped playing my PocketStation. Thanks, Japan.

So why didn't people care about VIII? Squall was a cool character, a lot less whiny than Cloud and a snazzier dresser. There was a love story, and it worked well and kept you playing. Sure, the way you made money was kind of weird... You pass all the tests at the beginning of the game, then you never have to worry about money again. You just get it automatically every few minutes just for having a high "rank." They were multiple choice tests, and you had to get them all right, but simple memorization and persistent test re-taking eventually led you to the top rank. Or you could find the answers in PSM. Either way works. But Final Fantasy VIII is not seen as a masterpiece by many, even though it improved on VII in nearly every way. Was it the release date? The same day as the doomed Dreamcast? Maybe Sega should have been more worried about that... the graphics were pretty much the same quality as the 32-bit PlayStation at the time. Oh well. Who knows?

An analogy to describe my first impressions of Punch-Out!! on Wii

You know when you listen to a CD, and you learn all the words, and you fall in love with the band, and then you go see them in concert, and it's just incredible?

Alright. You also know how when you listen to a comedy CD, then you learn all the jokes, and you fall in love with the comedian, and then you go see him in concert, and it SUCKS because you know every punchline?

That's how it is with Punch-Out!! on Wii. You played the original Punch-Out! and Super Punch-Out! to death, and this is the same game with prettier graphics. You know every jab, and every boxer's tell-tale signs, and all you need is the quick reflexes you honed back in the late 80's and early 90's.

It doesn't suck. It's fun. But it's the exact same fun you had 15 years ago. Is that a long enough wait for you to have forgotten the "punch"lines?

Tipping the Scale

Scale has always been a strange technical issue in video games. You're limited by the size of the character, and the camera angle, and the hardware. In old NES games like Zelda 2, Link was the same size on the world map as an entire village. Once he was actually in the village, the buildings were bigger, yet the inside dimensions never seemed to match the outside, like that magical car from Harry Potter that could seat seven comfortably in the back seat while appearing to be a standard size from the outside. Later (much later), Final Fantasy VIII graced the PS1, and towns were finally getting a sense of scale. Sure, Squall still appeared to be as tall as the buildings while outside the city limits, but at least they weren't the same dimensions anymore. I just think it was the hardware. The one game I can think of in that entire console generation that had an entire world set to scale was Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. If you wanted to walk somewhere, it took you as long as it would in real life. It was improved even farther in Oblivion, and we now had a living, breathing world that resembled our own, if our own world had goblins lurking behind the registers at Wal-Mart.

Come to think of it, first-person-perspecitve games were always in scale. But the scope of the levels was always so constrained. Remember the first TimeSplitters that debuted with the PS2? The one where you didn't even have to look up or down, a la Doom? The levels, especially compared to sprawling RPG's like anything Square produced, were miniscule. Luckily, technology and game budgets nowadays are so out of control that even low-impact games can have a sense of scale and verisimilitude. Unless its Nintendo, then you're still doomed to be stuck with the kawaii big head, little feet, Pep Boys look. Hope you sprites have been working out your neck muscles! You're going to need them.

Vital Stats

TheGameLlama

Level: 4
HP: 82/100
Experience to next level: 1,337 points

Strength: 40
Perception: 21 (needs glasses)
Endurance: 25
Charisma: 68
Intelligence: 88
Agility: 35
Luck: 50

Inventory:
- 360 games - 40 (3 unopened)
- PS2 games - over 100
- Wii games - 18
- Wii games being enjoyed currently - 0
- 6 plastic guitars
- 2 real guitars
- 4 gaming microphones
- Mountain Dew and Cheetohs (a.k.a. dinner)
- Dive-bombing cockatiel
- Geriatric cat of self-licking
- Ceramic lawn gnome
- $3 Salvation Army thrift store wall art
- 5-foot-tall cardboard Tiki man

Quest:
- Success - Find it. Slay a dragon, perhaps? They guard that, right? Next to the gold?

Secondary Quest:
- Go to work, bring home the bacon.
- Blog.
- Teach self web design.

Those ******* Aussies.

I've scoured the whole Internet, from Wikipedia to Yahoo! to the Australian Ratings board, and I am finding incredibly wide gaps in the consistency of Australian censorship. Apparently, it's OK to broadcast The Osbournes uncensored and have full frontal nudity in their SOAP OPERAS as long as you don't show someone's head exploding in a video game. Their music industry has three different "obscene" ratings, yet F-bombs are just fine on TV, as long as it's after 8:30 p.m.?! Ridiculous. And it's alright to have porn, as long as you import it. It's illegal to buy it in the country. Plenty of games are banned, too, then later reinstated after a particular bit is removed or edited (see: any GTA game). But they don't remove all the offensive stuff, just enough to make it a M15+ game. Like in GTA IV, you can pick up a hooker, but you can't swing the camera around and look in the windshield to see what she's doing. But it's still completely fine to chase her with a baseball bat and beat your money out of her afterwards.

There are so many weird things to get censored for in Australia. Fallout 3 was banned because it blurred the line between sci-fi drugs and real drugs. Bethesda took out the word "morphine" (it's called Med-X in the game) and removed the shooting-up animation and Fallout 3 was reinstated. It was also edited for Japan (they don't like atom bombs much over there) and it was not released in India at all (there are two-headed cows).

The average gamer in Australia is 30 years old. If they are going to censor TV, video games, movies, books, music, and all other art forms, both passive and immersive, the Aussies need to find a more consistent method of going about it. If you don't want boobies on TV destroying their child's innocence, fine. Get rid of them from everywhere. Picking and choosing where it's OK to see them just confuses children, grown-ups, and foreigners like me. I'm getting mixed messages, Australia! Can I swear and see violence/nudity or not? It seems that I can, as long as I stick to the appropriate format. Network TV, here I come!

Time out!

Time travel in games has always been a tricky subject, yet that hasn't stopped numerous companies from trying it out (see: Shadow of Destiny, Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time, Braid, Chrono Trigger, Ocarina of Time, Prince of Persia, and plenty of others). The big paradox with time travel, though, is that if you go back in the past and affect something, you present will not change. It's in the past. Chronologically, you've already changed the past, and your present should be exactly the same. It's destiny. It's complicated, what with all the parallel universes that "could" be created by dabbling in the affairs of history. Games tend to ignore the idea that you can't affect the future. I mean, come on, the whole idea of playing a game is reliant on the idea that you can affect the game's/world's outcome. But did you ever see/read The Time Machine? He made a time machine to save his girlfriend's life, went back in time and saved her, and then she just found a different way to die. If she hadn't died, the time machine would not have been created, so the mere existence of the time machine ensured that she would eventually have to die to necessitate its creation. It's circular and very, very fate-based.

If I was Bill Gates and had a time machine, I'd go back in time and make the PS3 have the Red Ring of Death instead of my precious 360. But the world would already be like that if he did indeed have a time machine... so maybe Shigeru Miyamoto is the one with the time machine? He did invent Mario, Zelda, and Metroid. Despite the Nintendo president's recent assertion, he may, in fact, actually be God. Or at least own a time machine.

Denied!

Wal-Mart recently told Green Day that, unless they offer a censored version of their new album, 21st Century Breakdown, they would not stock it at all. Green Day said, "Fine, but we're not going to censor our music. Don't stock our album then." Wal-Mart is the biggest music retailer in the country (and maybe the world... not sure on that). Green Day debuted at #1. Hmm.

There are no "edited versions" of games... yet. Will there be? I don't think so. Game companies won't make games that would receive an AO rating because major retailers refuse to sell them. However, the M rating is being stretched further and further, much like the MA rating on TV. Ever since South Park used "the S word," it has seeped into other networks like FX (see: Nip/Tuck and Rescue Me). Nip/Tuck is also practically softcore porn! It seems like nowadays the only thing you can't say on cable TV is the F-bomb and you can show most of the butt, just no nipples or full frontal. But that will change eventually. Our society is degrading at a rapid pace, and it's taking us all down with it. I think South Park would love to be the first show to use the F word - it'd be like receiving an Emmy for them.

Games have swear words, yet it doesn't make them more "adult." It just makes them more vulgar. Remember GTA III? Not a single F-word. GTA: Chinatown Wars? F this, F that... it's the only word these pixelated gangsters seem to recognize. And then there's House of the Dead: Overkill... sigh. Without Wal-Mart editing our art, who's going to save us from our fragile, vile selves? Our parents? Nah, they had their chance. Maybe the government should step in! Weeee!

Catalog THIS in your Dewey Decimal System.

Now that video games are becoming more recognized as "art," there is a growing movement amongst some of the geek elite to preserve their legacy for future generations to enjoy. And why not? Gutenberg Bibles are worth millions. Old Disney VHS tapes are worth hundreds of dollars each. The Beatles' White Album can't be found at a used record store for less than $50. Games start off being pretty expensive, and the price has never really changed much. Final Fantasy III (or VI, whatever you call it) was $80 when it first came out on Super Nintendo. Today, Fallout 3 is $60. But games decrease in value after a time, and a select few eventually become more valuable. Especially RPG's - Dragon Warrior IV, Shining Force, Phantasy Star, Final Fantasies, etc. But why does the enjoyment of old games have to be confined to the few people that can actually afford to drop a Benjamin on an original NES cartridge?

Let's get games into public libraries. Books are in libraries and people still go to bookstores. A lot of newer movies are free in libraries and yet people still rent movies. Old games, for some reason or another, have no forum in which they can be rented or played without actually owning them. Blockbuster and Movie Gallery have the entire center section of their stores dedicated to older movies, all the way back to the silent film era. Why can't there be a place we can go to enjoy classic games for $1 a week? Is this more viable than getting games into libraries, there's a profit to be made now! Sure, it can be hard to get many old NES carts to work... but that definitely doesn't mean that they're broken. Blow in it, slide it into the system so it barely makes it past the edge, pop the cart halfway up, turn your NES upside down, there are all manner of getting these old classics to boot up. If there was a mom and pop retro game rental store in my neighborhood, you can be sure that I'd be one of those kids hanging out there after class, waxing nostalgic with other gamers who also recall the good old days when "graphics" were a luxury and a "soundtrack" was synthesized MIDI beeps and boops. Sweet memories... would someone please get on this?

Tournament Time, Part II

Saturday, May 30th. The next GameStop tournament is coming to a town near you... Punch-Out!! That's right, Nintendo's newest and oldest fighter has a weak multiplayer mode that is apparently fun enough to make a tournament out of. You have to use the not-so-precise Wii Sports Boxing-esque motion controls and the only prize is a t-shirt for the winner. Who cares? Being the best in your city at something and winning a sure-to-be-amazing Punch-Out!! T-shirt is more than many average people could ask for. Sure, it might not be able to compete with the pink hoodie given out at the Nintendo World Store in NYC, but it would still fetch a pretty penny on eBay in a few months... or at least make all your retro-geek friends uber-jealous.

Who are the Gamers?

Video games have changed over the last 30 years from simple PONG and Space Invaders clones into a multi-billion dollar industry where games are on par with the relentless Hollywood machine that has been churning out pop culture for nearly three times as long. The people that play them have changed, as well. No longer are video games relegated to the basements of pimply nerds that have never seen a boob and spend their nights debating long and hard over the merits of D&D 4th Edition versus 3rd. Now, moms are gamers. Grandmas are gamers. Nerds are... still gamers. My cat is a gamer. Vin Diesel is a gamer. Spielberg is a gamer. Obama has a Wii. A recent study claims that American adults today have a 50/50 chance of being a gamer. So what is a "gamer" now, anyway? It doesn't seem like it should be a stigma on your popularity anymore, does it? If so, then half the country is unpopular. And Obama would have to be uncool, too. The only reason he got elected is because he's so cool! What is a gamer today, then?

MTV thinks they know. They had an episode of True Life profiling professional gamers, including one guy who works the "underground" circuit... the dank, seedy underbelly of the digital world that Miyamoto pretends doesn't exist. The real pros (at least at Halo) were teenage gangsta wannabe types that dropped out of school to play games for a living. Sounds like a pipe dream for the average American that has to hold down a full-time job.

Spike TV thinks they have the answer, too. The Spike Video Game Awards bring movie and TV celebrities (Lindsey Lohan? Really?) to the stage to give awards to games and people they've probably never heard of. Sure, the average celebrity probably looks a whole lot better on a poster than the average gamer does, but the commercialization of video game award shows may have the same effect on "real" award ceremonies (like the Interactive Achievement Awards) that the Wii's influence has had on the term "gamer."

Maybe Lionsgate knows the answer. Gamer, a movie about - gamers - is coming out this fall and will star Gerard Butler. Nothing like a little more press for our favorite pastime, eh?

Wikipedia has a fun little article on gamers, labeling the different groups, segregating people who play games into neat little social circles... but isn't the new "everybody can play" Wii mentality supposed to destroy these labels? It won't happen, but we can hope, can't we? However, many "hardcore" and "pro" gamers would hate to be included in the same group with people that just want to play a quick game of Peggle or Mob Wars before bed, and many "casual" gamers don't even consider the few stolen moments of their lives to be actual "gaming."

If you read this blog, you are probably a gamer. If you are an American, you are probably a gamer. If you have the kind of expendable income that could feed an entire third-world village for weeks at a time, you probably waste that money on selfish things... like games. You pay for an experience, an escape. An escape from what? That's what makes us all different. But in the Halo or Call of Duty lobby, we can all be friends sharing similar experiences, as gamers. Awww, sweet togetherness.

English Beat

Why does England get all the cool video game magazines? Retro Gamer, Games TM, X360, PowerStation... sure, they have American counterparts (Game Informer, Play, GamePro, Nintendo Power, PlayStation: The Official Magazine, Tips & Tricks), but have you even looked in an issue of Retro Gamer? BAM POW SLAM fan love e-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e. It harkens back to a day when homebrewers could release the next big, cool thing from a Tandy sitting in their mom's basement. There was no Madden franchise, or Tony Hawk re-hash, or Guitar Hero: Aly and AJ Edition. Gaming was pure, and the entire magazine makes me feel that the gaming landscape across the seas is so much more unpolluted than over here.

I'd buy a subscription, but it's £80.00 for a year. That's about $126, and I could subscribe to practically every U.S. game magazine for that price, even the ones that come with "free" demo discs. Bleh.

Auto-pilot

When you crash your car, the airbags deploy. There are even some new Mercedes Benzes that sense the crash and roll up the windows, adjust the seat for impact, tighten the seat belts, and close the sunroof. (Imagine if your seat adjusted, your seat belt locked, and your windows rolled up when you were just driving down the road, minding your own business! That'd freak me out, for sure.) When will the same safety features be implemented into online games? Oh no, you're down by 50,000 points on Rock Band! Auto-disconnect! Punk'd! Now who wins? Yeah, it might crush your reputation, but whatever. Now if we could only find a way to keep it from decreasing your TrueSkill rank... the cheating would be complete. We might be branded and lose all our Gamerscore, but that's a risk we'd have to take to win in life. Or win in games. Or whatever's important. I don't know.

Wii(Shovel)Ware

There are WiiWare minimum sales requirements. In North America, if a game is over 16 mb, it has to sell 6,000 for the developers to see a profit. Under 16 mb, they only need to sell 4,000. Considering that there are over 20,000,000 Wiis in the world, that doesn't seem like too many, even considering how few people connect their systems to the internet. The idea is that it will prevent developers from constantly releasing crap shovelware titles, clogging the WiiWare catalog with sub-par games. If only retail Wii games would abide by the same methodology... maybe we wouldn't have "games" like Imagine: Party Babiez clogging the shelf space while lesser-known gems like Klonoa and Zack & Wiki are relegated to the bargain bins.

Remember the Official Nintendo Seal of Quality, a symbol (and a new way of thinking) that helped revitalize the video game industry after E.T. destroyed it? Nintendo should bring that back, and make quality matter again. Nintendo's first-party offerings continue to be terrific, but one great new game a year won't keep your system going. Third parties need to step up, and Nintendo needs to reach down a hand a give them a boost.