Although, given his popularity being lower than any other president in history, his inability to carry out schemes successfully, and the fact that he's lost the congress in more ways than one, I'm going to sleep safe tonight knowing that he won't possibly be able to run agian... if he doesn't fall on his sword before the next election (I know I would if I had been that much of a disgrace).
What are you talking about, Pheonix Wright was released in the US on the DS. Yes, it had been released previously in Japan on the GBA, but I fail to see how this could be considered a remake. It was simply a selective console release for different regions. Anyone who considers that a "remake" needs to consider revising their definition of the term.
Imagine how much more computer literate everyone would be if their OS shipped with an easy-to-use programming language visibly installed! I'd argue that it'd do more than increase understanding of computers; playing with logic I will swear actively increases intelligence.
Keep the masses stupid enough to not realize that they have the capacity to be using a better OS, like Linux or OS X. Creating computer litterate people is NOT in Microsoft's best interest. You can be sure that Linux would be a lot more dominant than it is.
Either way, it's not a good sign. Actually, if he had been fed up enough to leave, it's probably worse, since it would suggest that the infrastructure is so fucked up that he couldn't take it anymore. This is bad... very bad...
And when Microsoft says they're releasing a Zune phone later this year, it most likely means, late NEXT year, sort of like when they announced that they were going to release an iPod killer "soon"... TWO YEARS AGO. iPhone may have a slow start, but once they're able to get out something comparable to the nano or mini (a cheaper, smaller, simpler version), the iPhone is going to sell like... well... iPods. Around that time, Microsoft will have launched it's behemoth with much gusto, and everyone else will have moved on by then.
The problem is that both Apple and Microsoft have a habit of starting at the top and working their way down. They make the biggest, most expensive thing FIRST, and then cut it back for more mainstream consumers. The only difference is that Apple does it 2-3 years before Microsoft does. If Microsoft is going to play second runner (which isn't neccessarilly a bad thing), they should target the mainstream market, and release things comparable to the iPod Nano, which is outselling the iPod by like 3:1. The iPod video isn't so much of a hot item right now, so why should the Zune? You can be sure the same thing will happen with the ZPhone (or whatever they call it), it will be comparable to the iPhone, but the iPhone Nano (or whatever) will be king of the hill by then, and no one will give a shit.
Final Fantasy, sure, but Castlevania? There's not a single Castlevania remake on the GBA or DS (maybe there was an old retro cart of the first Castlevania for GBA, but I've never seen it), all of the games released recently are new. Only a very very few of the DS titles are ports or remakes of anything. Even FF3 is virtually an entirely new game, done from the ground up. That and MarioDS are the only remakes I can think of for that system. The DS thrives off of mostly brand new titles and series titles. The DS has probably spawned more new series than any console in recent history. I'm looking at the list of hit games on Nintendo's website, and over half of them are games and series unique to the DS. I'm not saying that the PSP is only ports and remakes, but seeing that the DS has next to no ports, I don't see how you can say the DS is worse off. Hotel Dusk? Pheonix Wright? Sorry buddy, but the DS is proving to not just have in innovative control scheme, but is also spawning a lot of very original content.
I think he misspoke when he said "Large Enterprise Customers". He meant the IT staff and administration of Large Enterprises, and not because of their own personal use, but for the ease and lower budget of maintaining it. Users (that being anyone, including CEOs), will have no interest one way or the other, but the people who don't directly have to work with it, whose pocketbooks are defined by how much tech support they have to pay for, are going to be very happy. Not to say that that is a bad thing, but it seems that they've pretty much ONLY catered to that end of things, and have given the users, themselves, no real reason to love the damn thing.
Gaming culture has expanded drastically, that is for certain, in fact, once it left its base of nerds fiddling around in the basement, it's become fragmented into a number of very opposing sub units. Maybe Microsoft's thinking is that they're doing really well with the whole frat-boy image. If they were to start also catering to the jRock crowd, you might get a lot of 15 year olds and frat boys starting to say, "The XBox360 is for faggots!" So they've been picking and chosing their games carefully in which to maintain their rough-neck image.
I don't buy this... not one bit. Sales of video games are almost completely, directly proportional to how much you put into marketting them, and how WELL you market them. I work at an NBC affiliated TV station, and was a board op around the time Okami was released, I surf the intarweb probably for over an hour a day, largely on game related material. I never ONCE saw a commercial for Okami at either of these places. So am I all that surprised to hear that it didn't sell well? No. Not really.
Hell, I'm incredibly surprised I don't see more game ads. I probably see more GameTap commercials, and generic "Playstation Portable" commercials, than all specific video game commercials combined. Television advertising, especially for this demographic, is at the HEART of your marketting of a game. It doesn't matter HOW innovative the game is, if the main stream doesn't pick it up, no amount of yelling and screaming about it is going to make it popular.
These are not small budget companies or low budget productions, if they can afford to make a game like Okami, they can afford some national NBC prime time spots, as expensive as they are.
That said, I absolutely loved Okami, and am very sorry to hear the creator is so dissolutioned, like this.
isn't it ironic that so many industries have gone to pieces, all in the name of "deregulation". The Airline industry will never be the same after Reagan got a hold of it... I bet now Delta wished they hadn't lobbied so hard back in the day.
The dev-kits for the GBA, DS, and Wii are peanuts compared to the profit differences between the console and PC game market. Nowdays, many small companies, instead of making shareware games, are breaking into the handheld market... and soon, I think, the Wii market (since the dev-kits are priced similarly).
The other thing is that PCs had two things consoles didn't: network play, and high resolution. But that was then, this is now, and all major consoles have internet connectivity and 2 out of 3 have HD. As more people hook up their consoles to the internet and buy HD TVs these advantages the PC once had will dissappear. Then there's the keyboard; PC gamers always raive about how much better a keyboard is than a controller. But in actuality, the keyboard is a deterant for the majority of gamers, who would rather not be tied to an office chair, or have a big complicated controller on their lap.
But with consoles going online and at high defenition, the PC game market is only going to look grimmer and grimmer. There are virtually no major advantages to PC gaming, anymore. The innitial price difference between a work PC and a gaming PC is more than the price of a console. The fact that the PC game industry is a moving target, when it comes to hardware requirements, doesn't help. In the time of a console generation, you're going to spend a lot more money on PC upgrades than the price of a console.
I'm still of the belief that the main resistance to consoles is little attributed to features, graphics, styles of games, or anything of that sort... but more to a geek snobishness and the belief that PCs are somehow more "mature" or "sophisticated" than consoles. Why else do you hear PC users crassly refering to console gamers as "casual gamers"? PCs are to the game industry as SUVs are to the car industry: big, expensive, and more talk than walk.
Well, actually, you can save games onto an SD card (I know, I've done it). You can't play them off of there, but you can still re-load them into your Wii. Sure, it's an extra step, but it's not the end of the world. And like others are saying, it would probably only take a simple patch to do so.
Furthermore, expect anything above SNES level to be released on disc. The Wii downloads part of the VC is basically there for doing new games that are similar to classic games, in their content: arcade games, sequels to old classics, new games that use old formulas, stuff like that. Don't expect them to release Mario 128 on there. If you're going to do an N64 quality game... hell, you're almost there, just spend the time to add more polygons, and release it as a Wii disc. VC is for simple time wasters (although I would like to see some longer format games appear there too).
Well... why not? It'll just be more revenue for both companies, quite possibly skimming very little off of each other. GoldenEye, alone, is not likely going to decide the fate of a purchase, one way or another, it's just another $10 in Nintendo's pocket, and another game they can show off. If they both own rites to it, why not just call a truce and release them on their separate systems. Everyone's been speculating about this, but I've yet to see anything from the companies themselves that suggest it going one way or another.
I think soming like Okami has the best shot at being a Wii hit. Something half zelda, half rpg. You have the gameplay elements of an action/adventure, and the rpg elements of final fantasy, and you've go something.
Please, GOD, don't use the WiiMote as a mouse pointer for PC games like Baldur's Gate. That would get annoying very very quickly.
Yes, but a couple of years is an eternity in a race to convince developers that your product isn't a flop. This is NOT a marathon, it's a snowball race. There's also a chance that in 2-years, there's about a 50% chance that the HD wars will be lost to HD-DVD, in which case, the blu-ray player is practically useless. Plus, don't hold your breath for the PS3 to fall to $300 in two years. They're already taking a loss far greater than any other console in history, they simply can't afford to drop it down much more. No console has slashed 50% in two years (other than Nintendo, who makes a profit on their consoles to begin with). And Nintendo and Microsoft aren't standing still, by that time, the Wii could be down by 50%, and Microsoft could pull the 360 down to $250. The other companies have more room to pull their prices down than Sony. The percentage gap is only going to widen.
In two years, this is, most likely, how the game is going to look (360 and PS3 projections are of the higher end model):
I tend to agree with you, but I would like to point out that ease of programming has very little influence on a company's decision as to which console to run on. I don't mean to put down all you programmers out there, but programmers are at the bottom of the totem pole. The designers and marketting staff are going to make that decision for you, and the producers are going to listen to them. Programming makes up a very very small part of the time, work, and money that goes into making a game. If exclusivity wasn't awarded by the hardware manufacturer's, you can bet that every game developer would put in the extra 5% to get a small team of programmers to port the sucker to all major systems, and thus sell almost three times as many copies.
This is why I'm predicting that if the PS3 doesn't pick up, we'll be hearing from Square, soon, that FF13 will be ported to the 360 and Wii (it will be ported to both if they break their exclusivity contract)
I totally agree. The "Marathon" analogy just doesn't work in this business. A snowball is probably a better analogy. Once a console gets going, it pulls in developers and consumers alike, which then just feed off each other. It's an all out race to convince the developers that you have a product that consumers will buy into. You don't accomplish that, it's all over, marathon or not.
Totally opposite. Canvas Curse (for the DS) is one of the (if not simply THE) most innovative, and freshest platforms ever made. Unfortunately they've gone back to their roots a bit on this latest one, but I hear it's still good and has a lot of new things. No, Kirby is alive and kicking.
AAC has nothing to do with FairPlay, Apple, or anything else, for that matter. AAC is a completely open format that was meant to replace the MP3 (and should, but old habits die hard), Apple didn't want to use Vorbis because it requires a lot more battery power to encode... and people already bitch about battery life. FairPlay could theoretically be inserted into any number of file formats, it's just that Apple only uses AACs for music transfer.
So, again, neither of the As in AAC stands for Apple, it's an MP4 compression container file, that Apple bought in to... and most of the other companies are too busy with WMA and MP3 that they haven't bought into it yet. It's like saying that HD-DVD is a Microsoft format... no, it's a Toshiba format, in which Microsoft now uses.
I'm an epic gamer: jRPGs, Adventures... you name it, it's got a long involved format, I'll be there to try it. I'm also a fan of puzzles and innovative gameplay elements, as well. Marry those together, and you've got something that'll be fun, from moment to moment, but will last a while.
The "innovation" that the Wii brings is soully a gameplay one, so most of the big titles are going to focus on momentary gameplay elements. Obviously, a Wiimote does nothing towards improving on the character development within a jRPG. The unfortunate thing is that most long-form games are very light on the gameplay. jRPGs usually have stop-time menu systems, and the most basic of movement capabilities. Many times a jRPG will have a few "unique" gameplay elements, but most of them are fairly secondary, as the real skill in the game always revolves around more mental skill rather than the ability to aim and time attacks, for instance.
This means that RPGs and Adventure games are NOT going to be the first thing people think of when they pick up a revolutionary new controller. That said, there has been a push, within the jRPG genre, towards incorporating more and more gameplay elements, and the Wiimote may be exactly what they need. RPGs are becoming more action oriented and more puzzle-filled then they were just a few years ago. The Playstation era was all about honing plot and character development, and gameplay sorta went by the wayside. The PS2 saw some realization that there needed to be more, but many series floundered with endlessly gimmicky button-masher tack-ons. There are some good ideas, and it's good to see the industry trying, but they're not there yet.
But, it is expected that at this point in the Wii's life-cycle, most of the games are going to be short and simple. Nintendo's goal, after all, is to hook in previously non-gamers. The thing is, though, is that once you've hooked a gamer, they're going to demand more and more involved games. Most of the early DS games were simple mini-games, and now look where we're at: a (unfortunately pretty terrible) Metroid Prime spinnoff, an innovative Noir-styled Adventure, a major Final Fantasy release, the next numbered Dragon Quest, the list goes on and on. The DS has finally come into its own not just as a handheld, but as a full-fledged console with long-format games as well as quick time wasters. I expect that the Wii will follow a very similar life-cycle. Possibly even a bit quicker than the DSs, since there will probably be quite a few ports and spinnoffs between the two consoles, until the two consoles are running along side-by-side.
There are a number of fairly basic reasons as to why, at this stage in the Wii's life-cycle, games would be short and simple:
Nintendo, and the developers they work with, are really trying to reel in new gamers (I don't like the term "non-gamers", because they will be gamers soon enough), and a good way to do that is by putting out much more simple content.
Players are just getting their feet wet, and the developers want to give them time to get used to the new controls.
Developers are just getting their feet wet, they're going ga-ga over the new controller, and want to try a bunch of things out to see what works and doesn't work before jumping into massive projects head-first.
Long-form games take a lot longer to make. Nintendo gave developers about a 1 year head-start, but that's not long enough to create massive, in-depth RPGs, platformers, or adventure games.
Since short and simple games take less time to create, there are just going to be a whole lot more of them, period. This has always been the case.
But give it time, and all those things will change. Developers will become more confident in their ability to utilize the Wiimote well, new gamers will start demanding more and more in-depth content, and the long-form games that started developement soon after E3 will begin coming out in 6 to 8 months or so. Most systems don't get really big games until the end of it's first trimester. You'll notice that this is a trend: Final Fantasy VII, Ocarina of Time, Final Fantasy X and GTA III, Halo, Metroid Prime... all games that really brought their consoles into their own, and all of them were at least 8 months into the console's life-cycle. Hell, I can't remember anything that came out during the first 8 months of the PS2s life, same with the XBox and GameCube.
Well, I can attest to that. My buddy is looking at getting a DSLite. We went to the local Fred Meyer's here, and they were totally sold out, we called the store across town, they were sold out too, said they may have a new shipment coming in today. But yeah, it's looking to be just as hot of an item as the Wii. They still don't dedicate any shelf space to the Wii, as they sell out before they can stock them. They seem to have given up on controller space too... they're now simply using the Wii controller space to house unwanted SIXAXIS controllers, as Wiimotes and 'chucks also get snatched up before they can put them out.
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Although, given his popularity being lower than any other president in history, his inability to carry out schemes successfully, and the fact that he's lost the congress in more ways than one, I'm going to sleep safe tonight knowing that he won't possibly be able to run agian... if he doesn't fall on his sword before the next election (I know I would if I had been that much of a disgrace).
What are you talking about, Pheonix Wright was released in the US on the DS. Yes, it had been released previously in Japan on the GBA, but I fail to see how this could be considered a remake. It was simply a selective console release for different regions. Anyone who considers that a "remake" needs to consider revising their definition of the term.
Keep the masses stupid enough to not realize that they have the capacity to be using a better OS, like Linux or OS X. Creating computer litterate people is NOT in Microsoft's best interest. You can be sure that Linux would be a lot more dominant than it is.
Either way, it's not a good sign. Actually, if he had been fed up enough to leave, it's probably worse, since it would suggest that the infrastructure is so fucked up that he couldn't take it anymore. This is bad... very bad...
And when Microsoft says they're releasing a Zune phone later this year, it most likely means, late NEXT year, sort of like when they announced that they were going to release an iPod killer "soon"... TWO YEARS AGO. iPhone may have a slow start, but once they're able to get out something comparable to the nano or mini (a cheaper, smaller, simpler version), the iPhone is going to sell like... well... iPods. Around that time, Microsoft will have launched it's behemoth with much gusto, and everyone else will have moved on by then.
The problem is that both Apple and Microsoft have a habit of starting at the top and working their way down. They make the biggest, most expensive thing FIRST, and then cut it back for more mainstream consumers. The only difference is that Apple does it 2-3 years before Microsoft does. If Microsoft is going to play second runner (which isn't neccessarilly a bad thing), they should target the mainstream market, and release things comparable to the iPod Nano, which is outselling the iPod by like 3:1. The iPod video isn't so much of a hot item right now, so why should the Zune? You can be sure the same thing will happen with the ZPhone (or whatever they call it), it will be comparable to the iPhone, but the iPhone Nano (or whatever) will be king of the hill by then, and no one will give a shit.
Say what?
Final Fantasy, sure, but Castlevania? There's not a single Castlevania remake on the GBA or DS (maybe there was an old retro cart of the first Castlevania for GBA, but I've never seen it), all of the games released recently are new. Only a very very few of the DS titles are ports or remakes of anything. Even FF3 is virtually an entirely new game, done from the ground up. That and MarioDS are the only remakes I can think of for that system. The DS thrives off of mostly brand new titles and series titles. The DS has probably spawned more new series than any console in recent history. I'm looking at the list of hit games on Nintendo's website, and over half of them are games and series unique to the DS. I'm not saying that the PSP is only ports and remakes, but seeing that the DS has next to no ports, I don't see how you can say the DS is worse off. Hotel Dusk? Pheonix Wright? Sorry buddy, but the DS is proving to not just have in innovative control scheme, but is also spawning a lot of very original content.
I think he misspoke when he said "Large Enterprise Customers". He meant the IT staff and administration of Large Enterprises, and not because of their own personal use, but for the ease and lower budget of maintaining it. Users (that being anyone, including CEOs), will have no interest one way or the other, but the people who don't directly have to work with it, whose pocketbooks are defined by how much tech support they have to pay for, are going to be very happy. Not to say that that is a bad thing, but it seems that they've pretty much ONLY catered to that end of things, and have given the users, themselves, no real reason to love the damn thing.
He didn't say CBasic, he said MS-Basic, which also includes GW-Basic, QBasic, and Visual Basic, all of which were great.
So how does FF6 not fit in this catagory? Oh right, it's 2D...
Gaming culture has expanded drastically, that is for certain, in fact, once it left its base of nerds fiddling around in the basement, it's become fragmented into a number of very opposing sub units. Maybe Microsoft's thinking is that they're doing really well with the whole frat-boy image. If they were to start also catering to the jRock crowd, you might get a lot of 15 year olds and frat boys starting to say, "The XBox360 is for faggots!" So they've been picking and chosing their games carefully in which to maintain their rough-neck image.
I don't buy this... not one bit. Sales of video games are almost completely, directly proportional to how much you put into marketting them, and how WELL you market them. I work at an NBC affiliated TV station, and was a board op around the time Okami was released, I surf the intarweb probably for over an hour a day, largely on game related material. I never ONCE saw a commercial for Okami at either of these places. So am I all that surprised to hear that it didn't sell well? No. Not really.
Hell, I'm incredibly surprised I don't see more game ads. I probably see more GameTap commercials, and generic "Playstation Portable" commercials, than all specific video game commercials combined. Television advertising, especially for this demographic, is at the HEART of your marketting of a game. It doesn't matter HOW innovative the game is, if the main stream doesn't pick it up, no amount of yelling and screaming about it is going to make it popular.
These are not small budget companies or low budget productions, if they can afford to make a game like Okami, they can afford some national NBC prime time spots, as expensive as they are.
That said, I absolutely loved Okami, and am very sorry to hear the creator is so dissolutioned, like this.
isn't it ironic that so many industries have gone to pieces, all in the name of "deregulation". The Airline industry will never be the same after Reagan got a hold of it... I bet now Delta wished they hadn't lobbied so hard back in the day.
The dev-kits for the GBA, DS, and Wii are peanuts compared to the profit differences between the console and PC game market. Nowdays, many small companies, instead of making shareware games, are breaking into the handheld market... and soon, I think, the Wii market (since the dev-kits are priced similarly).
The other thing is that PCs had two things consoles didn't: network play, and high resolution. But that was then, this is now, and all major consoles have internet connectivity and 2 out of 3 have HD. As more people hook up their consoles to the internet and buy HD TVs these advantages the PC once had will dissappear. Then there's the keyboard; PC gamers always raive about how much better a keyboard is than a controller. But in actuality, the keyboard is a deterant for the majority of gamers, who would rather not be tied to an office chair, or have a big complicated controller on their lap.
But with consoles going online and at high defenition, the PC game market is only going to look grimmer and grimmer. There are virtually no major advantages to PC gaming, anymore. The innitial price difference between a work PC and a gaming PC is more than the price of a console. The fact that the PC game industry is a moving target, when it comes to hardware requirements, doesn't help. In the time of a console generation, you're going to spend a lot more money on PC upgrades than the price of a console.
I'm still of the belief that the main resistance to consoles is little attributed to features, graphics, styles of games, or anything of that sort... but more to a geek snobishness and the belief that PCs are somehow more "mature" or "sophisticated" than consoles. Why else do you hear PC users crassly refering to console gamers as "casual gamers"? PCs are to the game industry as SUVs are to the car industry: big, expensive, and more talk than walk.
I'm thinking that it'll be along the lines of a presidential concession speech... before Miyamoto takes the stage.
Well, actually, you can save games onto an SD card (I know, I've done it). You can't play them off of there, but you can still re-load them into your Wii. Sure, it's an extra step, but it's not the end of the world. And like others are saying, it would probably only take a simple patch to do so.
Furthermore, expect anything above SNES level to be released on disc. The Wii downloads part of the VC is basically there for doing new games that are similar to classic games, in their content: arcade games, sequels to old classics, new games that use old formulas, stuff like that. Don't expect them to release Mario 128 on there. If you're going to do an N64 quality game... hell, you're almost there, just spend the time to add more polygons, and release it as a Wii disc. VC is for simple time wasters (although I would like to see some longer format games appear there too).
Well... why not? It'll just be more revenue for both companies, quite possibly skimming very little off of each other. GoldenEye, alone, is not likely going to decide the fate of a purchase, one way or another, it's just another $10 in Nintendo's pocket, and another game they can show off. If they both own rites to it, why not just call a truce and release them on their separate systems. Everyone's been speculating about this, but I've yet to see anything from the companies themselves that suggest it going one way or another.
I think soming like Okami has the best shot at being a Wii hit. Something half zelda, half rpg. You have the gameplay elements of an action/adventure, and the rpg elements of final fantasy, and you've go something.
Please, GOD, don't use the WiiMote as a mouse pointer for PC games like Baldur's Gate. That would get annoying very very quickly.
Yes, but a couple of years is an eternity in a race to convince developers that your product isn't a flop. This is NOT a marathon, it's a snowball race. There's also a chance that in 2-years, there's about a 50% chance that the HD wars will be lost to HD-DVD, in which case, the blu-ray player is practically useless. Plus, don't hold your breath for the PS3 to fall to $300 in two years. They're already taking a loss far greater than any other console in history, they simply can't afford to drop it down much more. No console has slashed 50% in two years (other than Nintendo, who makes a profit on their consoles to begin with). And Nintendo and Microsoft aren't standing still, by that time, the Wii could be down by 50%, and Microsoft could pull the 360 down to $250. The other companies have more room to pull their prices down than Sony. The percentage gap is only going to widen.
In two years, this is, most likely, how the game is going to look (360 and PS3 projections are of the higher end model):
Nintendo Wii: $150
XBox 360: $250
Sony PS3: $450
I tend to agree with you, but I would like to point out that ease of programming has very little influence on a company's decision as to which console to run on. I don't mean to put down all you programmers out there, but programmers are at the bottom of the totem pole. The designers and marketting staff are going to make that decision for you, and the producers are going to listen to them. Programming makes up a very very small part of the time, work, and money that goes into making a game. If exclusivity wasn't awarded by the hardware manufacturer's, you can bet that every game developer would put in the extra 5% to get a small team of programmers to port the sucker to all major systems, and thus sell almost three times as many copies.
This is why I'm predicting that if the PS3 doesn't pick up, we'll be hearing from Square, soon, that FF13 will be ported to the 360 and Wii (it will be ported to both if they break their exclusivity contract)
I totally agree. The "Marathon" analogy just doesn't work in this business. A snowball is probably a better analogy. Once a console gets going, it pulls in developers and consumers alike, which then just feed off each other. It's an all out race to convince the developers that you have a product that consumers will buy into. You don't accomplish that, it's all over, marathon or not.
Totally opposite. Canvas Curse (for the DS) is one of the (if not simply THE) most innovative, and freshest platforms ever made. Unfortunately they've gone back to their roots a bit on this latest one, but I hear it's still good and has a lot of new things. No, Kirby is alive and kicking.
AAC has nothing to do with FairPlay, Apple, or anything else, for that matter. AAC is a completely open format that was meant to replace the MP3 (and should, but old habits die hard), Apple didn't want to use Vorbis because it requires a lot more battery power to encode... and people already bitch about battery life. FairPlay could theoretically be inserted into any number of file formats, it's just that Apple only uses AACs for music transfer.
So, again, neither of the As in AAC stands for Apple, it's an MP4 compression container file, that Apple bought in to... and most of the other companies are too busy with WMA and MP3 that they haven't bought into it yet. It's like saying that HD-DVD is a Microsoft format... no, it's a Toshiba format, in which Microsoft now uses.
I'm an epic gamer: jRPGs, Adventures... you name it, it's got a long involved format, I'll be there to try it. I'm also a fan of puzzles and innovative gameplay elements, as well. Marry those together, and you've got something that'll be fun, from moment to moment, but will last a while.
The "innovation" that the Wii brings is soully a gameplay one, so most of the big titles are going to focus on momentary gameplay elements. Obviously, a Wiimote does nothing towards improving on the character development within a jRPG. The unfortunate thing is that most long-form games are very light on the gameplay. jRPGs usually have stop-time menu systems, and the most basic of movement capabilities. Many times a jRPG will have a few "unique" gameplay elements, but most of them are fairly secondary, as the real skill in the game always revolves around more mental skill rather than the ability to aim and time attacks, for instance.
This means that RPGs and Adventure games are NOT going to be the first thing people think of when they pick up a revolutionary new controller. That said, there has been a push, within the jRPG genre, towards incorporating more and more gameplay elements, and the Wiimote may be exactly what they need. RPGs are becoming more action oriented and more puzzle-filled then they were just a few years ago. The Playstation era was all about honing plot and character development, and gameplay sorta went by the wayside. The PS2 saw some realization that there needed to be more, but many series floundered with endlessly gimmicky button-masher tack-ons. There are some good ideas, and it's good to see the industry trying, but they're not there yet.
But, it is expected that at this point in the Wii's life-cycle, most of the games are going to be short and simple. Nintendo's goal, after all, is to hook in previously non-gamers. The thing is, though, is that once you've hooked a gamer, they're going to demand more and more involved games. Most of the early DS games were simple mini-games, and now look where we're at: a (unfortunately pretty terrible) Metroid Prime spinnoff, an innovative Noir-styled Adventure, a major Final Fantasy release, the next numbered Dragon Quest, the list goes on and on. The DS has finally come into its own not just as a handheld, but as a full-fledged console with long-format games as well as quick time wasters. I expect that the Wii will follow a very similar life-cycle. Possibly even a bit quicker than the DSs, since there will probably be quite a few ports and spinnoffs between the two consoles, until the two consoles are running along side-by-side.
But give it time, and all those things will change. Developers will become more confident in their ability to utilize the Wiimote well, new gamers will start demanding more and more in-depth content, and the long-form games that started developement soon after E3 will begin coming out in 6 to 8 months or so. Most systems don't get really big games until the end of it's first trimester. You'll notice that this is a trend: Final Fantasy VII, Ocarina of Time, Final Fantasy X and GTA III, Halo, Metroid Prime... all games that really brought their consoles into their own, and all of them were at least 8 months into the console's life-cycle. Hell, I can't remember anything that came out during the first 8 months of the PS2s life, same with the XBox and GameCube.
Well, I can attest to that. My buddy is looking at getting a DSLite. We went to the local Fred Meyer's here, and they were totally sold out, we called the store across town, they were sold out too, said they may have a new shipment coming in today. But yeah, it's looking to be just as hot of an item as the Wii. They still don't dedicate any shelf space to the Wii, as they sell out before they can stock them. They seem to have given up on controller space too... they're now simply using the Wii controller space to house unwanted SIXAXIS controllers, as Wiimotes and 'chucks also get snatched up before they can put them out.
Okami = Wiiiii for the PS2!