Details on Nintendo's Original Downloadable Content

HaymarketRiot writes "N'Gai Croal from Newsweek has given us a broad outline of Nintendo's plans for downloadable original content. To be called 'WiiWare', the company will be selling these all-new games via the Wii's Virtual Store for Wii points. Not only are they looking to big-name developers for these titles, but small garage-style shops as well. 'Shorter, original, more creative games from small teams with big ideas; these are the buzzwords that you'll be hearing from Nintendo when its Wednesday announcement goes wide. Fils-Aime told us that while Nintendo, as the retailer, would itself determine the appropriate pricing for each game on a per-title bases, the games themselves would not be vetted by Nintendo. Instead, Nintendo would only check the games for bugs and compatibility, with developers and publishers responsible for securing [a rating lower than AO with the ESRB].' For more, N'Gai has an interview with Reggie Fils-Aime on the subject. Unfortunately, we won't be seeing a finished product until 2008."

Comments

Great!

[Aladrin]

I'm very much looking forward to this. So far, the most fun I've had on the Wii is still the first game, Wii Sports. I was -so- hoping that Wii Play would be as good, but it's nothing like it.

Super Paper Mario is nice and fun, but took almost no advantage of the uniqueness of the system. Excite Truck was good, not great. Trauma Center was better than the DS version, but still not as much fun as Wii Sports.

I'm looking for more little games like the Wii Sports ones that are fun solo, and a ton of fun with friends, and I'm willing to pay for them. I think this plan will bring those titles.

If I had a little more motivation, I'd gladly spend the ~$2k for the Wii dev kit and write my own games. Unfortunately, I still haven't even managed to motivate myself to do it on the PC for free. Some day...

Re:Great!

[earthbound kid]

I liked Elebits right up until the final boss, which was so irritating it retroactively made me dislike earlier parts of the game.

If you play Elebits, throughout the game you'll find various knobs that need to be turned like door handles and sinks. You'll also notice that the knob turning code is almost completely broken. It is impossible to turn a knob without causing your camera to spaz out and end up pointing at the ceiling. But it's mostly no big deal, because there are only ever one or two doors or sinks that need to be turned in a level and fixing your camera doesn't take that long.

So, what did they do for the final boss? They basically made a giant, cheap ass knob that needs to be turned a lot before it hits you with a cheap death.

What the hell? Were the developers paying any attention to their own game at all? Did they not notice that knob turning is the absolute worst part of the whole game and completely broken? Why would you make the worst part of your game into the final challenge? It would be like if in the final level of Mario 64 you have to keep your camera on Mario in a narrow space. It's re-freaking-tarded ass design.

Ughhhh.

My advice is you should buy Elebits but never, ever play the final boss. Doing so will just make you dislike what you liked in the game before and sour you on Konami.

Re:Maybe the author has a minimum article length?

[Blakey Rat]

Xbox Live came out before Steam, for one. (Xbox Live: November 2002, Steam came with Half-Life 2, released November 2004.) That aside, I'm not familiar with the features of Steam, so I can't answer that well, but I would guess:

1) Universal voice chat, including the ability to send voice messages to friends who are offline, to attach voice messages to game invites, etc. If you like, you can use Xbox Live as an IP phone.
2) Player feedback system which lets you mark a player as a griefer in only a few button presses, and works across all Xbox Live games.

I was kind of under the impression that Steam was only a download service and didn't provide the community features that Xbox Live did. It certainly didn't at launch, when I played Half-Life 2 with it, but maybe it does now.

To be fair to Nintendo, though, this announcement seems closer to Microsoft's XNA than the first-gen Xbox Live Arcade games. What I worry about is dev kits... Microsoft lets you use a regular PC as a dev kit for indie Xbox games. If Nintendo requires you to buy thousands of dollars of hardware to be considered, I'm not sure how successful they'll be at getting support from indie developers. Still, more power to them.

Re:Cool

[EveryNickIsTaken]

...the fact that Nintendo is taking a largely 'hands-off' approach to quality control should provide for a comparatively wide selection. This will also likely result in a number of buggy & crappy games being released.

Re:Really?

[grumbel]

The german USK costs around 250-1500 , depending on the length and complexity of the title. The BPjM will ban your game for free. No idea about BBFC, PEGI and whatever other rating organizations might be around there if you want to publish a title outside of the USA.