As someone who’s had a Wii since launch I’ve been waiting a long time for Nintendo to seriously address their hardcore gaming base. But the games for that base have been very few and far between. Unfortunately, the E3 presentation offered no new glimmer of hope. Wii Sports Resort, coming out next Spring, looked moderately interesting, but mostly because of the new motion-sensor add-on that will come with the game and allow the user’s movements to be received more precisely by the game. And frankly the biggest reason I want this is because the sensor “loses” where I am so often now, a frusterating situation. There was ONE standout game in my opinion, just one game I really wanted to play, and that’s Rayman Raving Rabbids TV Party. I have yet to be let down by a Rayman Raving Rabbid game, and this is a must-play for more gut-bustingly hilarious fun.
Nintendo took the opposite approach than Microsoft. Microsoft offered developers short time frames to introduce their games that left me starving for more. Nintendo spent 3 or 4 times as much time on each game covered. It was overkill, and downright boredom when it came to games I wasn’t interested in (which was most of them). Even worse than that, it left the viewer with the impression that they didn’t have very many interesting games coming out – a problem they’ve had since launch that they need to address. They also spent countless minutes showing charts and graphs and numbers: I felt like I was attending a board meeting. And then there were the repeated references to the casual audience, the number of female customers, and the number of units sold. As a female, the way they addressed the female gamers was insulting because we were grouped with the “casual” gamers. Frankly, being called a casual gamer is just about the worst insult I can imagine as someone who has been honing my skills and completely dedicated to gaming for the past 13 years.
The DS has had some great games for the hardcore gamer, but I didn’t see anything at all on the DS front that I’d want to play at this presentation. A GTA game was announced for DS, and it was hyped as “for the hardcore base!!!” but I think the majority of hardcore gamers will be satisfied playing this kind of huge, open ended game on a home console, and I doubt a lot of them, unless they are serious GTA fanboys, will want to play this DS game as well. The presentation of this “hardcore gamers!!!” game felt more like they were throwing us a bone, since everything else was for the casual gamer, with the exception of Rayman Raving Rabbids TV Party which is one of the few titles that could really live up to the tough proposition of being for everyone.
One of the “highlights” of the show was Wii Music. You push buttons and wave your wii-mote and nunchuck around and the game generates simplistic music, like the Mario theme song, for it. I love my music game, but this is definitely not for me. I love these games because of the realistic feeling of the controllers and the real top rate music by popular artists. This game has neither.
Shaun White made an appearance introducing Shaun White’s Snowboarding. But although the Wii version makes use of the balance board, I’m going to go with the Xbox 360 version, because of the ease of online play with friends and superior graphics.
All in all, I’d call the Nintendo press event a failure, at least from the standpoint of this hardcore gamer. Nintendo further alienated us and reiterated their dedication to catering to the “non-gamer”.
