Wow Dina look`s good as a blond & it look`s like she worksout

Now we know why Dina wasn’t at CES.
She was at that “other” trade show next door!

Oh Tom, Wii is so much more than Wii Sports. Zelda is an beautiful game. Metroid Prime 3 is a very cool FPS that allows you to actually point your weapon to aim it instead of using a control stick. Mario Kart is really addictive, and you can play online for FREE! I love being able to play with my out of state friend or against random people from around the world. Madden is much more fun to play with motion control than a old school controller. Although my sister went with Rock Band 2 in her house I went with Guitar Hero World Tour for the better music and we enjoy them both equally. They are just as good on Wii as they are on other platforms, according to her and believe me, she had spent countless hours playing Rock Band on PS3 with her friends.

I’m not a casual gamer, but I know I’m probably a Nintendo fan boy. I really don’t like playing with the old school controllers, they hurt my thumbs after playing too long. I had an NES way back in the day, as well as the original game boy, but played computer games until late in the Gamecube’s life cycle. I actually only bought a Gamecube to get back into console gaming in anticipation of the Wii’s release.

The Wii does have its flaws, I’m not blind to that. The biggest being the limited amount of top tier titles.

But c’mon Tom, you know you want to wave a Wii remote around for lightsaber duels. Oh yeah I love to drum too.

Where’s the link to the “Emotiva” thread. 😉

Okey dokey, did a search and found it:

http://forums.audioholics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=51683

I *love* the title: ” Emotiva isn’t good becoz it’s not in a mag, it’s not in a mag becoz it isn’t good…”

The OP definitely wanted to keep the title as low-key as possible.

Best podcast in awhile. There was actual banter between Dina and Tom. The Wii won this generation of gaming consoles–period.

I don’t quite get Tom’s hatred of the Wii either – especially since the Wii itself is just hardware. It’s like hating a DVD player because the first movie you saw on it was an Uwe Boll flick.

Obviously, if what you want most is the best in graphics and surround sound, an Xbox360 or PS3 is going to be much more to your liking. But I don’t get why anyone hates any particular gaming console. Did the Wii somehow make your Xbox360 games less enjoyable? I don’t get it.

Anywho, Tom’s remarks do seem to echo some of the sentiments of Xbox360 and PS3 fanboys. But trying to pigeonhole the Wii as “simplistic”, “kiddie”, “casual” or “crappy” is just as silly as saying that the Xbox360 offers nothing but first-person shooters. It’s totally up to the software, not the console itself. And games such as: Zelda – Twilight Princess, Super Mario Galaxy, Zack & Wiki (a spectacularly good and sorely overlooked game), Metroid, No More Heroes, Trauma Center, Elebits and upcoming titles like Mad World and The Conduit truly demonstrate that Wii is perfectly capable of delivering an extremely wide variety of game types and pleasures.

Wii Sports, Wii Fit, Wii Play and even the godawful Wii Music may be the poster children and because they are the most widely advertised and media-covered, I can understand where the erroneous perceptions of the Wii come from. But the primary reason why those titles get so much press is because traditionally “non-gamers” like grandparents and females are being convinced to play videogames by virtue of their much broader and less violent approach to having fun with a gaming console.

The pick-up-and-play Wii titles may be putting a videogame console into millions of homes, but there are plenty of titles beyond these more simplistic offerings. And to dismiss the Wii out of hand means that you miss out on some excellent gaming experiences.

My major complaint about the Wii is Standard Def. I can’t go back there.

BTW, where is the picture this week?

I’d have to disagree that the Wii is a “kids’ toy” or even perceived as being a “kids’ toy” by the public at large. The reason I say that is because many many adults are buying the Wii for themselves. And when I say adults, I’m talking the full age range of adults as in everyone from 18 to 100+. I personally know several people in their 50’s, 60’s and even 70’s who have bought a Wii to keep in their home. Is it fun for when the grandkids come over? Sure! But they also talk enthusiastically about playing the Wii themselves when there are no kids over.

Now frankly, that is just something I’ve not seen before with any videogame system. My parents and grandparents still fondly recall the orignial NES – they all got a kick out the original Super Mario Bros. But they never bought a NES for themselves. It really was thought of as a “kids’ toy”. But the Wii – they’re buying and playing for themselves. Maybe we can stretch and say that it appeals to “the kid in all of us”, but it really can’t be accurately called a “kids’ toy” when so many of the people who are buying and playing it truly aren’t even close in age to being kids.

In truth, the only people who seem to have some sort of problem with the Wii are people who seem to have some sort of need to see videogames taken “seriously”. I really think Tom’s fear of people getting bored and swearing off all videogames forever is totally unfounded. I’ve seen people swear off violent videogames. I know plenty of people who dismissed traditionally “hard core” videogames out of hand as being something “just for kids”. But the Wii – that’s getting their attention, making them smile and laugh and getting them to say, “hey…this is something I might enjoy too”. Quite the opposite of the fear that Tom expressed.

If your reason for not owning or wanting a Wii is that you only want high def graphics, only want the best in surround sound, or truly just don’t like the controller or any of the games that are available – I am totally ok with that reasoning! Those are very understandable and valid reasons to my thinking. But they are not reasons to hate the Wii or fear what it is doing to the perceptions of the public at large. The Xbox360 is still a huge success. And if your desires are what I just described, it’s probably the better system for you. But there aren’t a lot of grandparents buying a Xbox360 to play for themselves. That’s the system they get bored with or just never have any interest in to begin with. To a grandparent, 20-something is still very much “a kid” and the Xbox360, to them, is something “for the kids” in their minds.

I’m sure it was WordPress 😉

My last comment about Wii – Promise 🙂

I do think that some “hard core” or more “traditional” gamers are a bit worried that if the Wii is such a huge success, perhaps ALL videogames will move towards this “casual” direction and that the traditional or hardcore games that they love will disappear or decrease in availability. I think the greater fear is that Wii Sports, Wii Play, Guitar Hero, etc represent a general trend and that game developers will stop making “hard core” games and only make mini-game-fests and “casual” games from now on!

I strongly believe that this will not happen though. And my reason is because hard core and traditional games still make a lot of money. The “casual” games on Wii have expanded the videogame-playing audience. While there are no doubt many traditional and hard core gamers who have picked up a Wii and several games, the real story of the Wii is that it is selling to people who have never bought a videogame system before.

At the very same time though, games such as: Halo 3, Call of Duty 4, Madden, Grand Theft Auto, Gears of War and many other very traditional, hard core games are setting their own sales records and generating big profits for their developers.

Will we see more “casual” games hit the shelves? Will big-name developers start to focus on the new audience that Wii has attracted? Sure! I think they’d be foolish not to. But that doesn’t mean they are going to totally ignore the traditional and hard core games. There is still a huge hard core audience and hard core games still deliver big sales numbers and big revenue streams.

So it isn’t a matter of Wii and “casual” Wii games “taking over” the market or even “redefining” the market. The Wii has simply expanded the market and truthfully, that can only mean good things.

The people who make videogames still love traditional and hard core gaming. They aren’t going to stop making games that they would love to play themselves. At the same time, it only benefits the team making a hardcore game if their same parent company has a second team making a “casual” game for the Wii. That’s two revenue streams coming from essentially two different audiences – both of which are large and can potentially generate profit. That actually seems safer and smarter than putting all resources into a single hard core game and then being totally up a creak if it fails to catch on a sell in big numbers.

One hurdle seems to be that several developers see the huge install base of the Wii and wonder how they can tap into it with a more traditional or hard core game. On the other side are developers wondering how they might attract the “casual” audience of the Wii to a different gaming system. My honest opinion is that no one gaming system needs to be all things to all people.

Rob, you said the exact same thing I was going to say, but with one difference, you forgot to differentiate between developers and publishers. I also think that developers will still want to make the games they want to play, but it’s the publishers who have all the money to make this happen. It is also the big publishers who are run like traditional corporate entities whose purpose is to maximize profit. If there is a lot more money to be made in Wii-style gaming (including lower development costs), they will go that route and give more and more money to developers working on that stuff and less to the gamer market. There is potential for this to happen, but I don’t know if it will. I guess the possibility is enough to get gamers to denigrate the Wii.

Gaming has had such an early-adopter mentality; we all want the latest and greatest in graphics and physics. For many gamers, it’s hard to look at the Wii because it can be seen in many ways as a step-back, rather than a step-forward.

AustinM – very true and a really good point that you’ve made there. So far though, if we use what has happened (in terms of sales) as an indication, it seems to be that even among this new “casual” audience, quality still does count for a lot. Many publishers have flooded the Wii market with crappy shovel ware and terrible ports. They throw these games out there because they are dirt cheap to produce and even if they only sell a handful, they still make some money. But the good news is that this lazy way of publishing has resulted in very low sales for most of those games. Looking at the sales data, it’s clear that Nintendo’s own titles sell well, but other than Guitar Hero, most third party games don’t do so well. On the one hand, it’s good that the crap ware isn’t selling because hopefully that will encourage better efforts. On the other hand though, some very good games (like Elebits and Zack & Wiki) also get overlooked.

More to the topic of hard core games though, the popular ones are still racking up huge sales numbers and I genuinely do not foresee that changing. Nintendo’s self-published titles are huge and appear to lead in total yearly sales. But after Nintendo’s own games, it’s Grand Theft Auto, Gears of War, Halo, Call of Duty and Madden.

The money is still in quality software. It’s just that the definition of quality is now more expansive and generally means somewhat different things to the two different markets. On Wii, it isn’t graphics or pure technical prowess. But Wii gamers still want a quality gaming experience and they have largely spoken with their wallets that real “cash in quick” shovel ware ain’t gonna cut it.

“I mean, AVRant is talking about it, must be big”

I Too hate the Wii