Internets not happy with Nintendo's E3 Presser

Filed in archive Wii on July 16, 2008

"Winers."

So all is said and done at Nintendo's E3 presser. Here were my thoughts:

Great on the hardware end, below average on software. Animal Crossing was something we all knew about, so that wasn't a big deal. Wii Music is exciting, but the IGN guys are talking it down pretty badly. I disagree with them fundamentally, which deserves a seperate post (which I'll make later this week).

Still, we expected a Kid Icarus game, and maybe some news of something else, anything else. It seems, though, that the AAA games just aren't ready for prime time yet. They are clearly in development, but they are not ready for imminent, 2008 release.

On the hardware front, I thought Nintendo had a great conference. I'm pumped about Motion Plus, and the possibilities it can provide. I'm also excited about the voice chat solution. That's 2 major solutions to issues we'd been discussing on this blog for months and months. I only expected one solution to be unveiled, and that was the storage space problem; so I'm pleasantly surprised that we have two big items coming out on the hardware side.

So, all in all, there is plenty to be happy about. But you wouldn't know it from the internets. My goodness, the forums that I lurk at are foaming at the mouth. It seems the word on the street is:

1. No hardcore games announced, other than Animal Crossing.

That's a legit beef. Let's hope for more such announcements later in the year.

2. Motion Plus is what should have been released a year and a half ago.

This is crap. A company tries totally untested tech, on a console that nobody thinks can sell, so it is understandable that they would be conservative. Now that they have succeeded, they are expanding the capabilities of the console, even when they don't actually have to yet. They could have waited on Wii 2.0 for such changes. I don't buy this gripe, and I think it is hogwash.

All in all, the amount of bile on the net is sickening- let's get a grip, folks. There was plenty of good stuff here, and some of the things you wanted to see were probably just too early in development. That isn't to say Nintendo had a great conference- no, I'd give it about a C. But it simply is not the dismal failure some seem to think it is.

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Response from: Josh Pollard (07/17/08 7:51am)

I think that Nintendo's press conference was probably the least exciting out of the three, and for most of the reasons you said. They could use more hard-core games for people like me. What I disagree with you on is the Motion Plus attachment. Could it do great things for games? Absolutely. But I some-what agree with the people who think it should have been like this from the beginning. I feel that way for a different reason than most though I suspect. You see, the biggest problem facing motion plus is now developers will have to decide for what hardware they should target their game. Should they target their new games at the people who were willing to shuck out an additional $20 per controller for this attachment, or at the people who just have what the system came with. Remember the memory expansion pack for the N64 and how big of a flop that was? This smells a lot like that. Not to mention, I don't want to spend another $80 just getting my controllers up to snuff.

Response from: Rob Howard (07/17/08 11:43pm)

I smell something too, but we must be sniffing in different dumpsters (-:

What I smell is more akin to Sony releasing the first dual shock controller for PS1, which saw heavy adoption. Though the rumble doesn't add gameplay (and is therefore easier to deal with in development), the other parallels are there: Sony was market leader then, and could afford to make such a move. Nintendo was not the market leader with N64 and really the memory expansion add on wasn't even supported by Nintendo- which was its real kiss of death.

I think Miyamoto cleared things up today with his "the core games are coming" quote- a blog post will follow (-:

Response from: Josh Pollard (07/19/08 12:14pm)

I probably shouldn't have even mentioned the hard-core games because I've basically given up on using my wii for that. I still just really worry about this motion plus thing. its very different from the dual shock because the dual shock didnt really add that much to the gameplay, where as motion plus will be crucial to making those specific games really great. now developers are going to have to choose between the super good motion detection that most people wont have, or the regular and now what will seem like the "crappy motion detection"