3 October 2008

Wii gamecube remakes

This is an interesting turn of events by Nintendo considering that all the gamecube games work on the Wii from out of the box. However, i can see that this decision makes sense. For one, most people who bought a Wii would not buy a gamecube game for the console and i'm not necessarily saying that they don't know it works but the limiting fact that you have to buy another controller for the thing works against it if you're only going to get one game.

Plus, the branding of 'Wii' on the box and the fact that the announced games make a lot of sense for wiimote control should help bolster the Wii's catalog. Having Pikmin alone (one of my top 20 games of all time) makes this worthwhile!

On another note, the DSi was announced and there is much commentary surrounding this update of the DS. The one side suggests that it is a bad move by Nintendo by fracturing their userbase while not updating the handheld to the next level but still hobbling it with the same pitfalls that the current DS has (low resolution, etc). The other side seems to be optimistic on the inclusion of the cameras and SD card slot with downloadable games and the potential this has for the games to be developed.
I'm not sure where i sit on this scale. I only have an original DS (DS Phat) and couldn't justify the move to a DS lite.... however the DSi is sufficiently different enough that i could justify the purchase once the price comes down a bit. However i have doubts about the actual software released specifically for this handheld. How many games will take advantage of the camera when the multimillions of DSes do not have this function? How many games will be released via the downloadable store in regions outside the favoured Japan and US? (i.e. I'm a dirty european and have very few Nintendo games available)
If the install base doesn't increase at an exponential rate then there just won't be any support for the new feature(s).

2 comments:

Tesh said...

On top of that, I've heard that the DSi is hardware locked to region. Crazy.

Duoae said...

Yeah i read that too..... though it may only apply to the downloadable content as opposed to 'normal' DS cartridge games.