Hold on Tim, Don't Kill Us!

Hold on Tim, Don't Kill Us!

Tim, please don't give up on us while you suffer through the second half of Episode #116. We all have our opinions and yours is clearly different than ours, but let's not let that get in the way of our wonderful relationship, shall we? We respect you as a dedicated listener and will always welcome your comments to the show.

Yours truly,

Inside The Console

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The second half of our rant on Nintendo is up and available for your listening pleasure(?), and it's kind of brutal. I want to take a moment to sort of defend our standpoint with some of what we talk about on the show, but at the same time I am absolutely opening this up for discussion, as we want to hear you opinions and counter-points.

We aren't judging Nintendo as a company based on their press conference at E3, we're not that dense. We are judging Nintendo on their current lineup of software, as well as their oddball performance this generation. The Wii is different, and nobody can ignore that. Yes, it is definitely a capable gaming platform (we've never said that it isn't) but Nintendo is putting so much focus on areas outside of really good gaming. There have been killers, such as Mario Galaxy, Metroid Prime 3 and several others, but there has also been a tidal wave of "causal" party-games and non-games that we have never seen historically.

The question isn't so much "Is this a bad thing?", but more like "Is Nintendo side-stepping too far this time?" As Tim Sundberg said in his comments on last post, Nintendo has always been a little different and somewhat secretive. We don't have a problem with that, but it seems like, as a whole, the Wii was this great idea to change the face of gaming forever and really put Nintendo back on the charts but the plan was never really finalized. We think that Nintendo and third-parties have been distracted by the (over-cliched) money-printing capabilities of the box that they aren't focusing the true potential of the Wii squarely on new, innovative, and above all, standout gaming experiences.

Why is there only one or two games that play as well as Metroid Prime 3? Why did we get a GameCube-ported Zelda? Why was there nothing so Wii-exclusive to Mario Galaxy's gameplay that to remove it would have rendered the game unplayable? Where is StarFox, F-Zero, and Pikmin? These are all legitimate questions, and none of us are saying that Nintendo won't deliver on these in the years to come, but our biggest question right now is simply "What the heck are they doing now?"

So bear with us, give the show a listen, and please let us know what you think of all this in the comments. We really, honestly do appreciate hearing from you guys even (and sometimes especially) when you call us out on things that we say which you completley disagree with. We'll see you all next time.

-Phil