I've been debating whether to break down and buy Strikers for GC (I'm sorry Peach! Forgive me Daisy! I've been weak!), so I can easily dedicate myself to skipping over that first game and buying the sequel with few reservations.
Now... as for BWii... I bought the first and consider it seriously flawed, and ended up not actually liking it very much. But oddly enough, the appeal of online co-op and finally being able to reproduce my own units instead of having to "hardcore it" through every level (which is very painful for an empathic perfectionist like me) is making the second game almost a guar\anteed purchase from me.
If anything though, the most interesting thing out of this is that both of these games come from smaller third parties (which are based in Europe?), Kuju and that team that did Strikers. Given the example of Rare, Silicon Knights, Left Field and Factor 5, I was sure that Nintendo would've cut off these smaller developers who had experienced marginal or flawed successes. I personally predicted that we wouldn't see Kuju working with Nintendo again....
... and I also predicted that we wouldn't see anything from Geist-creators N-Space either. Interestingly enough, IGN recently reported that N-Space has Wii projects and is hiring for said projects.
As a Nintendo Fanboy, I'm very interested in what is behind Nintendo's continued relationships with these third parties when they've cut ties with larger more successful third/second parties before and when I was so sure they'd do it again.
~Carmine M. Red
Kairon@aol.com