Nintendo Confirms Mario, Smash Bros. Coming This Year

Some excellent news for Nintendo fans: two of the 'big three' games are coming out this year. At an event held in Washington state Reggie Fils-Aime was able to confirm that Smash Bros. and Super Mario Galaxy will be released before the end of the year. Excellent to hear such news, of course ... but other people had different priorities. For Metroid fans, it does indeed look like Samus will have to wait until 2008. Other than that, the company was all good news in general: "Typically, about half of home consoles in Japan are placed in the living room -- with Wii that figure is 75%. In France, 15 of the top 15 games recently were Nintendo. In the US, Fils-Aime says they are seeing 'early signs of significant market change.' The number of female purchasers of hardware are up 42%. The number of people over age of 30 purchasing Nintendo DS is up 127%. Tighten that age range to people over 35, and the number is up 212%. 40% of Wii owners have connected to the internet. 3.3 million plus Virtual Console downloads." Game|Life has hands-on impressions of Brain Age 2 and Mario Strikers Charged , two of the new games shown off at the event.

Comments

Wii needs strong third party games too

[ConfusedSelfHating]

The Wii has three games which have sold a million copies or more: Twlight Princess, Wii Play and Wii Sports. All Nintendo games. The Wii is still early in its product life, so it can be expected that not many games will have passed the million mark yet. The problem is that too much focus is on the first party Nintendo games. If third party publishers lack the hype necessary to sell their games, they will not bring exclusive games to the Wii. The Wii will merely get awful ports like Far Cry http://www.gamespot.com/wii/action/farcry/index.ht ml?q=farcry&tag=result;title;0/ and Spiderman 3http://www.gamespot.com/wii/action/spiderman3/ind ex.html?q=spiderman&tag=result;title;4#. Spiderman 3 apparently sucks on every console, but it sucks extra hard on the Wii. Far Cry was a great game for the PC, but has lost a lot of its lustre on the Wii.

Nintendo has to be willing to share the spotlight with it's third party developers.

Re:Wii needs strong third party games too

[Hitto]

You can add my voice to those complaining about that. I'm ashamed to say that mario *anything* games are THE mark of quality videogames in my eyes. Because... You know. It's mario.
But it's not Nintendo's fault if Nintendo games get crappy competition.

Here's my wii game list :

Nintendo games :
  - Wii play came with the remote. Nothing much to say. It's a decent billiards game for ten euros, come to think of it.
  - Zelda. 'nuff said. I liked it, and I'm one of the old farts who were seven when they had a NES. Without the nostalgia goggles, it's a great game, with the goggles, it's STILL a great game.
  - Warioware. The only game with decent competition (that being rayman, which I think is technically inferior but much funnier for a party)
  - Excite Truck. BEST DAMN GAME ON THE WII. Fuck the reviewers who trashed it, they didn't play it more than ten minutes IMHO. Everyone I know (in meatspace) who played it loves it. Even girls, dammit.

Non-Nintendo games :
  - Red Steel. I bought it, ignoring the bad reviews because of the above mentioned game, got to about 70% of the game, and will never finish it. I very rarely give up on a game because I'm a stingy bastard, but I can't bear more of this bugfest. Rushed pieces of shit with crap controls are just "store credit fodder" for another nintendo game. (That reminds me I need to get Mario Strikers)
  - Heatseeker : Meh. Disappointed, but it kills time well for an ugly, repetitive game. I'm not anti-ports or anything, but I was hoping they'd release at least ONE flying game where you could wield the wiimote as a joystick. Suppose it's too hard to code, until some guy at Nintendo does it.
  - Dragon Ball Z : Currently the only 3rd party title I enjoyed and can honestly say I got a full "bang for my buck ratio", but nostalgia plays a huge role in this, as I hadn't played a DBZ game since the SNES days.
  - Rayman : Decent game. Not spectacular, but easier to play with other people than warioware, so it gets more screen time.
  - Monkey ball : sold it after sifting through the boooooring list of minigames. Huge disappointment as I loved both episodes on the gamecube.

tl;dr : Statistically, my money is better spent on nintendo than on third parties. Not my fault or nintendo's.