Look, I wanted to love it just like everyone else, and briefly, I did. But it’s now almost five months after my last public complaint about the Nintendo Wii, and things haven’t changed much at all, aside from the fact that there are another couple layers of dust covering the cute little console sitting next to my television. And, where are we now? The same shitty titles, with a couple more mini-games bundled together in an effort to sell themselves as a unified title under the “party” heading. There’s still no good first-person shooter (mixed reviews my ass), the virtual console is still bland for offering mostly games from systems anyone over the age of 16 has already played during their initial incarnations, and there’s no online capability to speak of. All we have are promises after promises, but is it really going to take a full year before the Wii grows into what we expected it to be a month or two after launch?
WiiWare was formally announced today, which gives me some hope that Nintendo offers something unique, and given the poor library on the Wii thus far, it looks like indy developers are the Wii’s last hope, at least until we start seeing a reasonable online component supporting something compelling to play from larger developers. As it is, I’m sick of ports, or titles with Wii-mote capabilities hacked in.
Given the rather impressive assortment of games on XBox Live Arcade, is it too much to expect the same to happen on the Wii? Or, will development for the WiiWare platform fail because Nintendo is still unsure about launching a comprehensive, online service for multiplayer gaming? The apparent lack of a future hard drive for the Wii is another obstacle WiiWare developers will have to tackle, because as cool as SD cards are, having to juggle them around isn’t fun, and modern titles, indy or otherwise, aren’t as small as most virtual console titles.
Back when I bought the Wii, I expected it to single-handedly replace most of my gaming time, but I’ve since been relying on the XBox 360 and World of Warcraft to fill in the rather significant gaps in Nintendo’s offering. Unless Metroid Prime 3 or Super Smash Brothers manages to grab a lot of gamer attention, I don’t see any other titles on the horizon yet that will distract most console gamers from Halo 3 or Grand Theft Auto 4. At this rate, we may not see a true killer title for the Wii until 2008.
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