I was just looking over at my shelf of games; here are the non-downloadable games I currently own for the Wii:
- Super Mario Galaxy
- Animal Crossing
- Boom Blox
- Endless Ocean
- Rayman Raving Rabbids
- Super Smash Bros
- No More Heroes
- Super Paper Mario
- Wii Sports
- Wii Play
- Zack & Wiki
- Metroid Prime 3
- Zelda
- Super Monkey Ball
- Elebits
Which struck me for a couple reasons. For one, I didn’t realize I had that many Wii games: like most traditional gamers, a lot of Wii games aren’t really aimed at me, but I seem to buy (and usually quite enjoy) a Wii game about every other month. (Full disclosure, I haven’t played Endless Ocean—I bought it for Miranda, though I plan to get around to it myself—and I gave up on Super Monkey Ball very quickly, far preferring the first iteration of the series.)
But the real surprise was how widespread those games are. There are 15 games on that list, but they’re all in fairly different genres. I don’t think that’s happened to me with any other console: I’ll have multiple FPSes, or multiple RPGs, or multiple platformers, or multiple racing games, or something. The closest you get to that here is Boom Blox, Rayman, Wii Play, and Super Monkey Ball, which all have multiplayer minigame aspects, but to me those games are all noticeably separated in the design space from each other. Hmm, and Elebits and Metroid are both first-person games, but different from both a traditional FPS and from each other.
Not sure what to make of this. I think that part of what’s going on is that publishers other than Nintendo are only taking baby steps on the platform (except perhaps for minigames, witness the end of the previous paragraph), and Nintendo isn’t repeating itself on the console yet. And I’m sure a lot of what’s going on is just coincidence, just a fluke of my current tastes.
Post Revisions:
- January 12, 2009 @ 21:25:38 [Current Revision] by David Carlton
- January 12, 2009 @ 21:24:58 by David Carlton
- January 12, 2009 @ 21:24:38 by David Carlton
- January 12, 2009 @ 21:20:26 by David Carlton
- January 12, 2009 @ 21:16:54 by David Carlton
- January 12, 2009 @ 21:14:09 by David Carlton
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Most of the games I bought for Wii are on that list. And there’s the explanation right there: If there were lots of good Wii games, you’d pick and choose the ones of the kinds you like best. But when there are so few decent ones, we’ll just take as many of them as we can get, regardless of what kind of game. We’ve gotten less picky, because we’ve had to. If you only bought FPSs for Wii, you’d never play anything.
1/13/2009 @ 3:36 am
I don’t know if you like sports games or not, but MLB Power Pros is a fantastic series. I got my buddy into the series and he really doesn’t like sports games. What really drew him in was the rpg simulation of being in college. You go to class, meet people, get a job (if you want), practice and play games. Random events occur and you gain experience based on what you do and how well you do in the games. Oh, and the baseball part has been refined over the past 15 years or so. I highly recommend it.
Anyway, I don’t think your Wii collection is so much a reflection of your tastes, but the strange selection of games on the system. Name me one good rpg on the system. . . . . . . Exactly. Opoona? How about good fps games? I can think of a couple. It’s such a strange catalog of games.
1/13/2009 @ 4:54 am
I’ve named one good Wii RPG: Super Paper Mario! Don’t ask me to name two, though.
On the one hand, of course both of you are right: there isn’t enough breadth within a givin genre, especially third-party breadth, so I’d have a much harder time specializing on genres. (Especially if I didn’t want to significantly lower my quality standards.)
But I don’t think that’s all that’s going on here. Boom Blox, Wii Sports, Zack and Wiki, Rayman, and Elebits are all games that depend significantly on the Wii controller, that would be impossible or much worse on other consoles. And Animal Crossing and Endless Ocean are games in genres that most other publishers aren’t interested in putting out. So I do think that Nintendo really is expanding the design space here: it’s not just that individual areas of the design space are less well represented, it’s also that there are more areas in the design space that are represented at all.
And I like that! But I’m also glad that I have a 360…
Thanks form the MLB Power Pros mention, by the way. Kind of reminds me of another game I’m playing through right now, namely Persona 3.
1/13/2009 @ 11:11 am
MLB Power Pros and Persona in the same sentence!?!?! Call me shocked. But I can see what you’re saying.
And you’re completely right about Super Paper Mario, which I really enjoyed. Totally forgot about it.
1/13/2009 @ 6:29 pm