The Pretentious Gamer

From Blade Diary.

I still am in disbelief that they are letting Warren Spector do this.

A recent NYTimes article addresses Epic Mickey and what it means for Disney’s characters.

Keeping cartoon characters trapped in amber is one of the surest routes to irrelevancy. While Mickey remains a superstar in many homes, particularly overseas, his static nature has resulted in a generation of Americans – the ones that grew up with Nickelodeon and Pixar – that knows him, but may not love him. Domestic sales in particular have declined: of his $5 billion in merchandise sales in 2009, less than 20 percent will come from the United States.

“There’s a distinct risk of alienating your core consumer when you tweak a sacred character, but at this point it’s a risk they have to take,” said Matt Britton, the managing partner of Mr. Youth, a New York brand consultant firm.

Nintendo, Miyamoto, take note! Capcom, take note! “Keeping … characters trapped in amber is one of the surest routes to irrelevancy.” Mario and Link are not sacred! Megaman is not sacred! Give us something new, something relevant! These characters and franchises are sorely in need of some new ideas.

They’re still fun, but they’re safe, guarded. They aren’t moving games forward.

Right now Nintendo is caught between taking advantage of nostalgia (New Super Mario Bros. Wii) and presumably finding the best direction for the next big Mario and Zelda productions. If I were them, I would be pushing for a major reimagination.

Not like it matters, considering the enormous pile of cash the big N has reeled in since the launch of the Wii, but Iwata has stated that Wii software isn’t so hot these days, and sales are down. Refreshing honesty!

Nintendo’s president Satoru Iwata has admitted that sales of the Wii console have stalled, in part due to a lack of must-have software.

The company released data yesterday that showed sales of the home console were down over 40 per cent in the six months to the end of September 2009, with 5.75 million Wii’s sold worldwide, compared to 10 million the previous year.

“Wii has stalled,” Iwata told a press conference, reports Andriasang. “We were unable to continually release strong software, and let the nice mood cool. We were unable to show a new game to become ‘the next thing.’ In the game market, once you‚Äôve lost the momentum, it takes time to recover,” he offered.

“With the price drop, sales returned to a certain level, but they just did not reach the level of last year around this time,” he said. “We decided that it would be difficult to sell enough to recover from the poor performance of the first half of the year.

However, Iwata was upbeat about forecasts for the full-year, with expectations the company can sell 20 million consoles by the end of March 2010.

“In order to reach it [the 20 million units target], we will have to move quite a large quantity, but it’s a figure we released after having felt the momentum returning.”

Preening for the press? They’ll be fine, but the Wii is reaching critical mass and should be on its way out, for sure. I’d be surprised if they reach that 20 mil mark. They already lowered it from 26 mil.

One unfortunate thing is the fact that it once again comes down to third party support. N64, GC was the same story – for the most part, the only people making money on Wii and DS is Nintendo. It’s a shame that cycle still hasn’t been broken, not even close.

This isn’t exactly a sad story per se – overall the Wii is obviously an ENORMOUS commercial success; Nintendo is still rolling in dough. However its still a story of unfulfilled potential for quality software and the user experience. Hopefully their next step will involve taking their pile of cash and cooking up something inspiring. I’d say this next round they won’t be taking any lead on input innovation… Microsoft seems to be in front there. The question is – where’s the innovation on output?

Like many others, I briefly got my hands on the New Super Mario Bros. Wii demo at E3 this June. Still being a sucker for the franchise, I had some fun with it, and despite the simplicity of the DS game on which it was based, I was quite fond of Mario’s recent foray into 2D gameplay. New Super Mario Bros. DS was by no means as complex, expansive, or rewarding as Super Mario 3 and its ilk, but it was a refreshing reminder of the good ol’ days, and carried the promise of hopefully more retro Mario games.

After the initial enjoyment of a bunch of SMB characters running around on an old-school level subsided, I realized why the idea felt so comfortable and familiar. The fact that side-scrolling co-op platformers have been done many times before (from Chip N’ Dale’s Rescue Rangers on NES to Little Big Planet on PS3) notwithstanding, co-op in Mario felt like something that should have been done a long time ago. Considering all the advances Nintendo made in the genre, why did it take them until now to come up with this, after its been done so much before?

This feeling of general surprise at Nintendo’s failure to capitalize on this much earlier was then accompanied by a distinct and sudden memory of playing Super Mario Bros. on NES for the first time and starting up two-player mode with my little brother. I remembered the feeling of disappointment that struck me when I realized that we had to actually take turns playing – we couldn’t play together. The fact that this was a six-year-old’s first assumption on seeing that there was a two-player mode in the game makes me wonder – did it really take a Little Big Planet for Nintendo to come up with this? Having basically invented the 2D platformer in its heyday, this idea couldn’t possibly have been pushing their creative limits that much, could it? And technologically speaking it was certainly do-able.

A poster on NeoGAF explored what might have been.

How long will the Mario series hang on? How much more can be done with it? I wonder.