A Nod to You, Dashboard Confessional

It is not often that my minority views are actually vindicated by real life. This isn't to say that my opinions are by and large wrong or outlandish, just unpopular at times.

Vindication has come, at last.

After a year of the new generation of video game consoles being on the market (two for the Xbox 360), it turns out the Wii games have exceptionally low rating scores compared to other systems. Compared to all the consoles in both last and current generation video gaming, Wii games appear to be consistently worse than their counterparts.
I have long held that the Wii is a console built on gimmicks. Nintendo, an aging empire, attempted to avoid competition with current console king Sony and underdog bruiser Microsoft by completely skirting traditional gaming and making a "revolution" in gameplay.

Except it's not a revolution. It's a mouse. That you point at the TV. This is not a revolution; this is Duck Hunt, except now every game is forced to use hypersensitive and nonsensical controls that are less precise than my mouse.

The whole point of gaming is that you generate a lot of output for very little input. I press a button; my dude does something really fucking awesome. In order for you to to increase the input, you should increase the output - games like Guitar Hero are prime examples, which make you feel like a rockstar badass as you whale on the guitar. Wii games, on the other hand, are exciting for the better part of an hour, and then you just feel like a noob. An intern for a Wii software development company gave me this advice:

"When you play the Wii, rest your arm against something stable and comfortable, like a table or an armchair with a pillow on it. This should help you reduce the excess movement from things like breathing."

Breathing.

In the article, the man tries at the end to dismiss the findings as reviewers looking at the Wii's "poor graphical output" and prematurely rating the games as suck because they just "don't understand Wii games."

It seems more likely to me that reviewers, who review games for a living, just aren't fooled. Consumers, on the other hand, are gobbling up the Wii like crazy, and companies like Ubisoft are scooping up large bundles of cash off of poor games like Red Steel. The Wii has become a media frenzy and people have looked at games like Wii Sports (which, I hear, is pretty good.) and just churned out minigame generators for people who buy games based on the pictures on the back of the box.

When Wii developers realize that shaking a Wiimote back and forth isn't a game, then I think the system will be put to good use. Unfortunately, the quality of games doesn't seem to matter from a business standpoint, because the Wii is making more money than ever.