Timstuff
Avenger
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- Jul 26, 2004
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I disagree. How do you blame Nintendo for MadWorld being mediocre? Or Dead Space Extraction getting no advertising? EA has the money to do it.
Madworld was bad because EA did not invest the money and talent necessary to make it AAA. Why would they do this? Because Nintendo has not given them reason to do otherwise. Madworld was mad on the cheap, and when you try to make a big game on a cheap budget you get a big cheap-o game. As for Deadspace, it probably did not have a big marketing campaign because EA did not think it was worth promoting heavily since they were likely not expecting very good sales.
I do agree they should have some more first party titles. But at the same time, why bother? They have a gold mine of 1st party franchises to go to. Star Fox, DK, Kirby, Pokemon, Pikmin. Then you take into account franchises like Earthbound and Kid Icarus that can be revived. The problem is they're just focusing on Mario, Zelda, and Metroid but I think that's a separate issue.
Old franchises aren't enough, though. Nintendo has platformers covered with Mario and Donkey Kong, a strong Fantasy adventure franchise with Zelda, a sci-fi adventure franchise with Metroid, and a sci-fi shoot-em-up with Starfox, but there's a lot of places where they're still weak. Nintendo hasn't had a viable shooter published under their marquee since Perfect Dark 10 years ago. Nintendo is still EXTREMELY reluctant about publishing 1st party M-rated games, and that's been a bad weakness of theirs for a long time.
I blame 3rd party developers for the lack of good third party games. It's not as if they've tried to make a hit that's worth it. Can you think of any good 3rd party Wii game that they tried to build up and had a strong marketing campaign to go with it? I can't. Third part developers don't try and you can't blame Nintendo for not making new IPs for that.
Again, if Nintendo was doing everything they could then they wouldn't be in this rut. If Nintendo wants top-shelf third party games on Wii, they need to start by publishing the kinds of games third parties think won't sell on Wii, giving them good budgets and putting their top talent behind them, and then making money off of them. A good place to start would be to make some M-rated games for hardcore gamers, because that's something that a lot of core gamers have given up on seeing Nintendo make (and core gamers happen to play lots of M-rated games).
I think Nintendo should be doing a little more crowd control when it comes to the amount of horrible shovel-ware released for the Wii. Sony and Microsoft are always conscious of their portfolio of games and try not to release too many bad games into their library each month/year. Nintendo on the otherhand seems to not give a **** about what random crap is released and put on store shelves to represent their console.
This is true. An an EGM article I read called "the Nintendo Seal of Quantity" I read pretty much said that with Nintendo there's pretty much no quality control for third parties. The illustration for the article was the Nintendo Seal of Quality with the words "of quality" being erased, and interestingly enough, Nintendo actually did that. The Official Seal of Quality was changed to being just the Official Seal around the time that Nintendo started focusing on casual games, probably at the behest of their legal department. Sony's standards on their older hardware tends to be on the lax side, but at least they HAVE standards and make an active effort to keep shovelware off of their newer systems (and their older ones, to a lesser extent), as does Microsoft.