M and I got our Wii last April (I think it even arrived on April 1, if you can believe that). Since they were still scarce at the time, we pre-orded a Wii bundle from EB Games. It included the Wii (with all the normal stuff - a Wiimote, nunchuck, Wii Sports), Wii Play, a second nunchuck, a Wiimote charger, Zelda: Twilight Princess, and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. While it ended up costing us something like $450, it was nearly all stuff that we would buy anyway (well, maybe not Wii Play, but it's a good deal on a 2nd Wiimote, so it worked), and since it would get us a Wii without going to a million stores, it was a good way to go.
About the time that I finished Zelda and Metroid, Mario Kart Wii was coming out, so I pre-ordered it and it arrived shortly after its release date. Now that's a really good game - it has lots of re-playability to unlock everything. Its online play is great as well, since lag is pretty much nonexistent. Sure, it uses the evil friend codes, but that's just how Nintendo does things, sadly.
Luckily for me, right when I was starting to get bored with Mario Kart, Amazon had a sale on Wii games and I picked up Super Mario Galaxy and Super Smash Bros Brawl. Super Mario Galaxy is amazing (plus it was cool that M could assist as the second player), and Smash Bros has a ton of things to unlock, too. Good games.
Also during all this, M and I played through all of the Lego games - Lego Star Wars, Lego Indiana Jones, and Lego Batman. While Indiana Jones was very short, Lego Star Wars was insanely long. They're all pretty fun.
But after that...nothing. There just wasn't anything on the Wii that interested me after those games. It's like Nintendo front-loaded all of their game releases early in the Wii's life cycle because they thought no one would want to play them later, or something. The only game I've played since then is Force Unleashed, which wasn't all that great - so much promise, and it didn't follow through. At least I got it on sale, though.
Part of the problem might have been that third party developers and publishers assumed that the Wii would be just like the Nintendo 64 and Game Cube - not all that popular. Sure, the games by Nintendo would be good, but other than that no one would really care. Apparently no one was expecting it to be this popular.
Another problem is its hardware. While to some extent "graphics don't matter", when it comes to pure horsepower, there are things that the Wii just can't do that the Xbox 360 and PS3 can. This, naturally, limits the number of games that can be ported to the Wii from the other consoles.
In any event, the net result is that I haven't had much of a reason to use our Wii for the last six months or so. That is definitely not a good thing.
However, things are definitely looking up for 2009. The poster boy of hardcore Wii games, The Conduit, finally got a release date of June 9, which is excellent news. Thankfully there are other interesting games coming, too:
- Tenchu: Shadow Assassins (out last week) sounds promising, but there are some mixed reviews initially. If nothing else, it's a step that this game got released on the Wii at all, though.
- MadWorld, which isn't something that I would play, it's still good to see mature content developed for the Wii. That should help it shed its "kid only" stereotype, hopefully.
- Muramasa: The Demon Blade also looks promising from what I've seen/read of it to date.
- Sin & Punishment 2 looks like it was born to be played on the Wii. I picked up the original last fall on the Virtual Console, and it was a solid title. Sure, it was a bit hard to follow, but this was basically a Japanese release. I'm sure the sequel will be better suited to a non-Japanese audience.
- House of the Dead: Overkill seems like it was tailor-made for the Wii, as well. The whole run and gun genre should work really well with the Wiimote.
- And finally, the shocker last week that EA will be bringing Dark Space to the Wii. I don't think that anyone saw this coming, but it's definitely good news. I'm not sure how good/bad it will turn out, but hopefully EA will do it properly and not just blindly port the game. Given how much effort they are planning to put into the Wii this year, they will likely do it right.
At least from where I am looking now, 2009 looks to be much better than 2008 for the Wii. One interesting thing about this list is that only one game there is published by Nintendo (Sin & Punishment 2), and none are developed by them. While supposedly their developement teams are busy working away in Japan, nothing much has been announced yet. While it would be nice to see something from them in 2009, it's probably much more likely going to be 2010 before any of their games are released. If nothing else, this should give third party developers a chance to shine on the system without any competition from Nintendo. That is definitely a good thing.
