Looks like the Wii refuses to go anywhere.

[WiizerFanboy]

As if the Resident Evil 4 port wasn't enough. Capcom is now porting Resident Evil 0 to the Wii:

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/33250.html

My question is this: The gameplay remains the same. The Graphics remain the same. The Wii is backwards compatible. WHY in god's name would you buy this game for 40-50 dollars, and play it with a crappy, more complicated and gimmicky control scheme, when you can buy the game cube version of the game for maybe about 10 dollars with a more enjoyable control scheme? If this is all that developers can offer us for the Wii, then the Wii is just wasted potential, and you can count me out on purchasing one.

... And yeah I KNOW my name is Wiizerfanboy, but it means something completely different than "Wii Fanboy" .

[Vamp [Bot]]

Speaking of the Wii, I read a rather interesting article on Joystiq yesterday:

http://www.joystiq.com/2008/04/24/count ... e-wiicube/

A somewhat surprising tidbit from the article is that, while Nintendo broke records selling more than 1.4 million copies in its first week with Super Smash Bros., its sales dropped a precipitous 90% after just 4 weeks. At that point, the sales of the game were apparently bad enough that retailers began to bundle the game with the Wii system in order to sell through their inventory. What this data suggests is that, while Nintendo may be expanding the audience that it can sell the Wii to with casual games like Wii Sports, it's failing to expand that same audience into other franchises that may represent more traditional genres. The Wii isn't just selling Nintendo-developed games and some casual games to a big audience; the audience seems almost strictly divided into casual, low-attach-rate gamers, happy with Wii Sports and picking up the occasional Wii Play and whatnot, and Nintendo loyalists who have probably played Nintendo games since the NES days. The Nintendo loyalists snapped up Super Smash Bros. instantly, and once all of those gamers had it, sales dried up soon after, seemingly failing to really expand through word of mouth into the casual crowd.

At the same time, well-reviewed 3rd-party games, like Zack & Wiki and No More Heroes, typically perform poorly on the system. This makes perfect sense considering the schema of Wii owners that we're assuming, as these games don't fit into either the casual gamer or Nintendo loyalist profile. The exception to these rules are well-established franchises, like Resident Evil or Guitar Hero, as even Nintendo loyalists (and some casual gamers) know about these and probably have played them on other systems, whether theirs or a friend's.

Is this starting to sound familiar to anyone else?

[...]

With arguably the best development teams in the industry, Nintendo has cultivated an extremely loyal fanbase who anxiously await every one of their new releases. Since these games are Nintendo published as well, they reap the full reward of their sales as well. And, of course, the Wii hardware is selling at a much better overall rate than the Gamecube, meaning that Nintendo's installed base is bigger and allows for higher software sales. But, like the Gamecube, there are some troubling aspects of the strategy. Namely, it seems to alienate 3rd-party developers, and it makes the company dependent almost entirely on self-developed "hits" a few times a year.

What Nintendo must have realized after the Gamecube is that it could only produce so many of these traditional "Nintendo-loyalist" games per generation, and therefore limited the number of "hits" it could rely on during its run. Adding in "Casual Gamers" has allowed Nintendo to basically augment the number of "hits" they can produce, as the manufacturer can simply sell those games to a different, parallel audience. This would also suggest that Nintendo may not be served well by trying to blend games for consumption by both audiences, as it's trying to do with Mario Kart Wii. This could have the effect of actually alienating both of the major audiences that the Wii seems to be thriving with.

So what do we have? A machine that's selling the same games that sold on the Gamecube, as well as (mostly) Nintendo-developed casual games. Hardcore gamers may mock the Wii as simply "a Gamecube 1.5 with waggle", but the business strategy actually makes this seem like a fairly apt comparison. Say hello to the WiiCube.

[WiizerFanboy]

I'd say that last paragraph in that article is pretty accurate. It's really disappointing.