It doesn't really matter, everyone knows the best customer is the loyal customer, the customer who actually cares about the products that company makes.

All the video game companies that threw in their lot with the casual audience with inevitably pay the price of betting their dollars on people who don't give a shit about them or their games beyond a momentary gimmick.

Take Halo for exactly, at one point it was bigger than Jesus, and now what? Casual attention span.

Worst offenders are Splinter Cell.

I agree. I recently played Mafia II which had a sandbox environment but no idea what to do with it. The game revolves around a main quest with no side missions whatsoever, and as a result the game forces you to fuck around needlessly, driving between locations with no stimuli along the way. Sandboxes can be fun and engaging, but some games are just crippled by the lack of focus.

That's why we play video games.

Touché.

Nintendo have stumbled onto a hilariously ironic marketing strategy. They have taken their battered customers, like so many battered wives, who they have mistreated and let down console generation after console generation, and they have not only convinced them that they want LESS features than the competition, but that they ONLY want Nintendo-published titles!

Quick history lesson. For he N64 and Gamecube generations both, Nintendo was staunchly anti-piracy, even at the cost of losing third party support. The N64 was essentially devoid of third party hits, most notably RPGs. The Gamecube didn't get any of the top third party AAA titles like GTA because of the storage limitations, and increased costs of putting games on those mini discs.

So for two generations, people foolish enough to stick with Nintendo HAD nothing but Nintendo published titles, and now somehow, these people have been branded/brainwashed to see this as a badge of honor, which has led to the few amazing third party titles that DO get released on the Wii and DS such as Madworld, GTA Chinatown, and The World Ends With You failing MISERABLY!

And the coup de grace, undoubtably, is the Wii U. Nintendo colonized girlfriends, wifes, grandmothers, etc by lulling people into accepting inferior technical specs in return for being able to swing your arms around to play your games. Now, the Wii U is the *same thing*, but now WITHOUT motion control! And the pre-orders have sold out nationwide! It's fucking genius!

And the final irony is that the complete failure of the GBA connectivity on the Gamecube, where Nintendo hatched a scheme to force every GC owner to buy a GBA (then $100 or more) to use as an inferior controller to play multiplayer is now MANDATORY on the Wii, AND the "Iwii" pads are NOT available for purchase at launch.

*slow clap*

So Nintendo gets to keep selling people remakes of remakes, and collections of remakes of remixes, and expansions to old series with no innovation (Zelda has been the same game essentially since the first game, excluding the second one), and the fans keep falling for it! And the ONE good thing they do come up with (virtual console), NOBODY USES!

It's a train wreck, and it's sad, but damn if I can't look away.
The old Nintendo standby of the ILLUSION of an open world via gates/keys/powerups/etc worked better IMHO. In Metroid, you feel like you can go anywhere, though you always have to come back later, after finding the item that opens the door. Nintendo does this kind of gameplay very well, and it's likely why Zelda and Metroid has been so successful.

Nintendo has held this mindset since the NES. Nintendo would only manufacture the game cartridges in house. In order for a third party developer to make a game for the NES, they would have to sign a very strict contract with Nintendo limiting production of the game to only the NES and also usually setting a minimal number of copies to be produced. This was all thanks to the 10NES authentication chip located in both the system and the game cartridge. If the game cartridge didn't have the chip, the game wouldn't load. The only company to ever go around Nintendo was Tengen, a subsidiary of Atari.

[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tengen_(company]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tengen_(company[/url])

Sigh the Nintendo hate is really annoying, "ooh nintendo only has a few 3rd party devs and has low specs for WiiU" and the still have worthwhile games for me to get for the WiiU and besides Nintendo does NOT control the game industry, they have their own space, PC gaming has their own space, Sony has their own space etc.

and the n64/ gamecube comment at least the gamecube had a very good selection of games with a good amount of variety.

But of course if Nintendo lasts long their policies as of now will not last forever, pretty soon Satoru Iwata will leave along with other board members and new people will replace them and change their policies to be like thier competitors or bettter than their competitors

Innovation for the sake of innovation is something that I am not interested in. When it comes to games, I want them to know what they want to do and execute that idea well. That is why established franchises like Zelda and Metroid shouldn't wander away from the formula too much, because their very name is a label for something specific.

That said, it is possible for franchises to branch out, but only if well executed and retaining something essential to previous efforts. Here is a couple of games that have significantly changed their series in a good way:

Castlevania - Symphony of the Night
Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars
Metroid Prime
Megaman X
Megaman Battle Network
Ogre Tactics
Demon's Crest

uuhh those 2 are not good examples imo as they are vastly different from their roots gameplay wise.

Metroid Prime is good because its first person view was secondary to its core features, the open world and others. (even though I like a new 2D metroid right about now)

Symphony of the Night...I'm divided on it. It has the core things from castlevania of older like platforming and such, but removed the linearity in favor of open world along with the addition of RPG elements that changes the rules.

Gameplay isn't the only thing that characterizes a franchise, it is also the atmosphere and characters that mark it. That is why Super Mario RPG was readily accepted, while Metroid: Other M was rejected, because their player bases had developed notions of what was 'natural' and 'unnatural' to the settings of each franchise.


Also, I think that Megaman Battle Network is a good entry in the Megaman franchise - it has one of the few real-time RPG battle systems that actually works well in my opinion, and the way that battle network re-envisions the Megaman universe isn't that weird. The premise of Megaman was originally one of a where a robotics revolution took place, where there are machines capable of thinking like humans, yet possessing capabilities far outstripping their creators. That is a very natural fit for progressing into the Megaman X canon, which is considerably darker.

However, something like Battle Network wouldn't work unless you turned back the clock. In the MMBN universe, instead of robots becoming a part of daily life, AIs and social networking was revolutionized instead. This split explains why this timeline is inherently brighter, because the damage caused by the digital conflicts doesn't as easily spill over into the physical. In the end, we have a split timeline. This makes quite a bit sense thematically, considering that Megaman was inspired by Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy.

So explain to me how the Wii U is worth it. It's a gimped Xbox 360 that STILL won't have standard online matchmaking (IE Nintendos nanny state "Friends codes"), uses a gimmick ipad wannabe controller, meaning that all but one player is being deprived, and features primarily only first party titles. That $250 could upgrade your PC, or buy you a copy of every 360/PS3 game you don't have. Why invest in hardware that will never give a return on investment entertainment value wise?

The real knife in the gut is the fact that they have not guarenteed that wiiware/virtual console purchases will transfer over. Aka, Nintendo charging you for the same games all over again, their standard MO.
Ninja Gaiden: Other M was rejected because it was not made by the Metroid team, had nothing to do with Metroid, and was a slap in the face to fans who had been patiently waiting for a TRUE (aka side scrolling) Metroid game since Fusion.

From what I understood of Other M, the great flaw was in how Samus was presented, not the gameplay. With any luck, Nintendo would learn from Other M what doesn't work for the franchise, which is probably the best possible outcome for a bad entry in any series.

It was a Ninja Gaiden mod, it had nothing to do with Metroid. Also, Nintendo claimed that it's release was specifically meant to satisfy fans who wanted the old style metroid as oposed to the FPS Prime series.

How insulting. Giving the IP to a third party to reskin an existing game with.

I already upgraded my computer to play Battlefield 3 and the Witcher 2.

And also Because it has good games I actually want to buy, Pikmin 3, The Wonderful 101, Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate HD (we rarely get a monster hunter here in the west), and ZombiU. Thats 4 solid games, and goddammit enough with the gamepad being gimmick wait for the games to come out and than judge it.

Also Gamecube games are going to be in virtual console, and there are games on the gamecube I have never played and gamestop stopped selling them and I refuse to use Amazon.

As for the not transfering Virtual Console games from Wii to WiiU well the same problem could happen to Microsoft and Sony.

The last thing I would say is that I am thinking this is the last console I buy and than stick to PC gaming, because I am not looking forward to the "True" next gen from Sony and Microsoft.