If I was going to write up a report card of Nintendo for the Gamecube era it would have had these points:
What you're doing wrong:
- Third party support is not very strong. You have to be accomodating to provide incentive for third parties to support your system. Being stubborn and inflexible does not work.
- You need to match industry standard features if all of your competitors offer it. Refusing to make online games was the wrong idea because the rest of the industry went with it. If you're the only one out, you're out of date and both third parties and potential customers will reject your system if it is out-of-date.
- While you often have very creative ideas, this approach is not always necessary. You do not need to do everything in a unique way. You need to recognize when a new approach will improve something and when something is already being done in the most logical, conventional way it could be. If someone else is already doing something the ideal way to do it, just do it the same way. There is no benefit in something being different arbitrarily.
What you're doing right:
- The games. Your games are often ambitious and creative and of a high quality. The controls are tight and responsive, the graphics are good, the games are often bug free. There is your greatest strength. Keep up the good work.
- Your physical hardware is of good quality and is well-built and reliable.
- When they aren't unique entirely for the sake of being unique, your ideas are often creative and fun. You have emormous potential for great ideas and just need a better filter to determine when to go forward with them.
Now after the Wii I would say:
What you're doing wrong:
- All points in previous report are still a problem with no noticable improvement and in the case of third party support the situation has gotten worse.
- The one thing you absolutely got right was the games but you now will intentionally make unambitious games for casuals and non-gamers. You have made titles like NSMB, which lack creativity, entirely because they will sell well. Corners are cut with titles like Pilotwings 3DS reusing elements from Wii Sports Resort. Outright low quality games like Donkey Kong Barrel Blast have been released. The standards of controls have fallen considerably with many games have loose, unresponsive controls to push gimmicky control schemes, without an option for responsive traditional controls. In fact Metroid Prime 3 is one of the only Wii core games that doesn't have the option for traditional controls that truly feels like it requires the new control scheme. Otherwise great games like Super Mario Galaxy and Donkey Kong Country Returns suffer from imprecise "waggle" controls that come across as unnecessary, with no alternate control scheme available.
What you're doing right:
- Aside from the games, the items from the previous report have not diminished.
- When none of the problems outlined above are present, you still appear to have the capacity to make great games.
So my general opinion of the Wii is that Nintendo fixed nothing and broke the one thing they did better than anything else.
Topic: People Need To Stop Bitching (Read 93820 times)
