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Nintendo Unveils Casual Gamer Brand
The Guardian Gamesblog discusses the newly announced Touch Generation of games for Nintendo's consoles. From the article: "This is, of course, a pointless piece of product re-positioning, symptomatic of modern business's obsession with branding above and beyond the call of sense. More importantly though, it's about Nintendo reveling in its E3 success. It is about a company that has effectively spent the last decade in its own self-made ghetto, turning to the industry and saying, 'I told you so' ... The wider world is coming back to videogames - and Nintendo is speaking its language. Anyway, the first three new releases in the Touch Generations line-up will be Big Brain Academy, the second title in the brain-training series, Magnetica, a marble-based puzzler, and Sudoku Gridmaster, a Sodoku game with over 400 puzzles. They're out this summer."
I found the bragging about 400 Sudoku puzzles slightly comical when other games have several thousand/millions of puzzles. I mean, a sudoku puzzle, it can't take more than a few hundred bytes to store them.
Nintendo , Sony and Microsoft are a bit like The Finches in the Galapagos isles(The phantom being more like the Lesser spotted Galapagos Fantastapotamus) .
Sony and Microsoft are unfortunately both going after the Bugs , whilst Nintendo has decided to screw it and eat berries .
There are a lot more Bugs out there , but they require more energy to catch and you have to deal with the rival birds.
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Obviously this blogger has never taken a basic marketing class in his 80's university classes. As one marketing giant once stated: "If you are too intelligent to be swayed by advertisement, then why, when I say 'Jolly Green Giant', you think frozen peas?". The power of branding is extreme and Nintendo realises that although their brand strikes a cord with those who grew-up with Mario and Co., everyone else sees Nintendo as a waste of time for young boys. Nintendo is realises that seizing the new "casual gamer" market can't be done through that lens and so is providing the new customer a way to look at the product without thinking of Mario and classic video games. To market everything under the Nintendo brand would make a difficult barrier for the new user and taint the brand image for the old user.
Since my left hand is disabled, I am unable to play any games that require the directional pad. I've tried, believe me. It is difficult for me to shop for DS games since the ones that do operate with the stylus only use it for mini-games. I have found many games that run completely on stylus control, but I had to do alot of research to make sure that was the case.
I was going to write Nintendo today to see if they could provide a list of games that only required the stylus.
Lo and behold: they've already done it.
Damn, I haven't been this pleased with Nintendo since the 8-bit days (Even if they have been helping me unintentionally).