Gaming Thoughts... 6/30/11 ~ Chalgyr's Game Room

Gaming Thoughts... 6/30/11

June 30, 2011 13 comments

Got a few quick ones here.

First, hackers suck. Of course, I could be talking about the Sony downtime or the various gaming companies hit by this particular internet blight, but unfortunately I'm referring to my own situation. Apologies for anyone who got a spam email from my Yahoo! account. My work machine apparently picked up spyware (downside to tech support - I'm stuck opening files and visiting sites customers want me to go to frequently and it looks like one infected my cpu) - and then my email got hacked shortly after (some incredibly bored person spent nearly 2 hours sending out individual emails w/ links in them according to my sent folder that next morning - downside to having that email account for over a decade - I've accumulated a lot of addresses in my addy book).

Work cpu is currently getting wiped by IT, I've changed all my passwords, should be good to go but I apologize all the same.

Next up, a quick thought on Nintendo: I really feel like they're giving their Wii customers the bird. There's really no other way for me to put it (okay, I suppose there's a lot of other ways to put it, but I don't really want to).

I felt like E3 was almost a joke for Wii customers. Their main presentation only showed one title, and everything else was about the 3DS and the Wii U. There were very few titles for the Wii shown separately as well of interest. Now on top of that, there are a trio of games that North American gamers have been waiting on for some time:

- Xenoblade Chronicles
- Last Story
- Pandora's Tower

Now mind you, these are not titles everyone's been excited for, but enough people have been excited that a lot of gamers have come together to try and draw attention to the titles and get a response from the big N about whether or not they will come to the US as sites like IGN have been teasing content from them for a long time. Apparently Nintendo even told IGN they would have a specific, detailed response for the website on the matter - but has apparently backpedaled and made a brief Twitter and Facebook post saying that these titles would not be making their way to North America. You can read more about it here.

So, what do you think? Is Nintendo making a mistake? Are they blowing off Wii customers? Is this just a big to-do about nothing at all?

My personal feelings are that it sucks. I've been looking forward to 2 of these games for quite awhile. I haven't seen many compelling Wii titles released of late, and those two things combined with E3 have me quite down on the system and Nintendo. What does that mean for me? Hard to say. If I buy a handheld, I'm probably going Vita. I believe Sony's device looks more appealing, but if all things were equal I'd probably lean toward the non-Nintendo device right now on principle. Does that affect my interest in the Wii U? Maybe a bit, if only because I feel a bit let down by Nintendo lately to begin with, but I'm still very skeptical on the console at this point anyway.

Matt Sainsbury30 June, 2011 19:50
I've learned over time the hard a fast rule about corporations is that if they can make a lot of money doing something, then they're going to do it.

Which means NoA has decided they're not going to make much money from those three RPGs. Are they right or wrong? I'm not sure, but I do believe they have a better view of the overall American marketplace than I do.

So while it does suck for a few people, there's a reason for it. Nintendo isn't in the habit of pissing off its fans for the sake of it.

BTW - While The Last Story is quite good, Pandora's Tower sucks, so you're at least not missing out on much with that one :)
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coffeewithgames30 June, 2011 22:08
"So, what do you think? Is Nintendo making a mistake? Are they blowing off Wii customers? Is this just a big to-do about nothing at all?"

I think it's a stupid decision to not bring them over, and I would even add Disaster: Day of Crisis to the list.
They have games, yet they don't want them to reach a larger audience?
Even if it was a limited print, I'm guessing they would make more on it than it would cost them.

@GamesAndBiz:
How do you know Pandora's Tower sucks? I thought Australia wasn't getting it for a while(is it even announced?), or has it already released?
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Robert30 June, 2011 22:48
Sorry to hear about the infection, that's always a pain. My favorite was some malware that kept popping up, uh, questionable literature on one of our training laptops. :)

I was pleased to see some of the WiiU and hope they do the rest of it (online) correctly. Though the lack of solid Wii announcements did suck and I have no confidence that they have anything worthwhile before WiiU. (maybe skyward sword excepted) Wii Play Motion?

For what it's worth NoA is getting hammered pretty hard about those games on Facebook lately.

As usual I'm disappointed with their VC releases which has seemed to slow to a crawl. Perhaps like GamesAndBiz said it isn't worth the expense.
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Matt Sainsbury30 June, 2011 23:16
@ coffeewithgames - the joys of being able to read some basic Japanese and owning a Japanese Wii.

And the other Japanese press and folk's opinions seem to mirror my own impressions of the game. It's not that I've missed something with imperfect language skills it's just a button mashing mess.

Limited press runs can still lose companies money, and are, in fact more expensive to produce than wide-scale releases.

If Nintendo thought there was reasonable financial justification for bringing a niche game into the country, then they would. This is the same Nintendo that published Samurai Warriors 3, remember.

Games business wisdom generally holds that new IPs at the end of a console's life cycle = bad idea. By the time those three RPGs are localised, then the Wii is very much at the end of its life cycle. I would hazard a guess that Nintendo considers all three risky investments, at best.
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Matt Sainsbury30 June, 2011 23:18
Sorry, that should read "more expensive per unit"

Margins are incredibly tight for limited runs.
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Chalgyr01 July, 2011 11:35
@Coffee - I tend to think it's a poor decision - at least on a couple of fronts. Didn't I read where the Rainfall group managed to get Xenoblade pushed to #1 on Amazon's pre-order list? Sounds like money to be made that gets left on the table.

@Games - Pandora was admittedly, the least interesting to me - I wanted Last Story though quite a bit and am very disappointed by that one in particular.

@Robert - I've been seeing a lot of the FB and Twitter beating NOA is taking, and it does seem like Zelda's their one 'big push' for Wii users right now. As such a popularly installed console right now, I'm a bit amazed/annoyed with their approach to it. Even when the PS3 was coming out, Sony had great games coming out on the PS2 for years.

And once again, just a huge 'sorry' about the email thing. What a huge pain in the arse. :P
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Chalgyr01 July, 2011 23:37
Interesting - IGN posted a similarly themed article a day after I did mine:

http://wii.ign.com/articles/118/1180293p1.html
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Robert02 July, 2011 12:29
Interesting article. It certainly wouldn't hurt for them to be more open with fans and make an effort to not just throw another party game into the mix.

Even if they lost money to gain a better sense of loyalty and community it could pay off later on.
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Chalgyr04 July, 2011 00:10
@robert - precisely. it sends a pretty iffy message, one that I know a few people are starting to feel is along the lines of:

- Thanks for your support, and we anticipate your continued support on our new products. And we appreciate your understanding that these are our focus now, and not your Wii that we convinced a huge number of people to buy over the years, and basically abandon before our 'replacement' system is even out yet.

Hmm, that's pretty wordy. But you get the idea. I mean, in terms of games, I only really am super bummed about Last Story. But when I consider how long Xbox kept their titles and network support running into the life cycle of the 360, and how long quality PS2 titles were made into the life cycle of the PS3, it'll be interesting to see if Nintendo does anything similar with the Wii and Wii U - or if they will drop it for the new system, which in part is what a lot of people thought they did when transitioning from the Gamecube to the Wii as well. It's just that the Gamecube was not in as many homes so I suspect there was less complaining then
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Robert04 July, 2011 10:46
Lol, wordy, but that captures the feel of what's not going on right now.

Look at Persona 4 being released for PS2 *two* years after the PS3's release... I'd love to see that type of continuity with *quality* games for the Wii, but it's not looking very good.
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Chalgyr04 July, 2011 11:00
@Robert - right? I mean, thankfully, I have lots of systems. it doesn't generally bother me when it's being made for one system and not another, but it's becoming a trend.

IGN just reported that Tales of Grace - originally a Wii game - is not getting a Wii localization. Instead it's getting released in North America for ps3 only:

http://wii.ign.com/articles/118/1180450p1.html
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Robert04 July, 2011 23:44
@Chalgyr:
I like the first comment there about there being more announcements about games NOT coming to the Wii than there are releases.

It also doesn't make much sense about the amount of content not fitting on the Wii. If they knew they needed the amount of storage that blu-ray offers, then there's no way it would fit to begin with....
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Chalgyr06 July, 2011 08:13
@robert Exactly. Plus the Wii uses lower resolution to begin with - seems like that would keep the sizes down. I dunno - but it is getting a bit depressing. I'm not necessarily 'down' on Nintendo - I played more Wii than anything over the weekend. But I'm not a huge fan of their current strategy
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