It's easy to see that the Wii is popular now, but I'm more interested in the playing field a year from now. Once some of the so-called "next gen" titles come out - on PS3 and Xbox360, how many people will still be flocking to the Wii? Maybe they'll continue to want the latest Mario/Zelda games, but I doubt that'll be satisfying long-term.
I suppose they might lose the Hardcore gamers like ourselves, but it seems the target market of the Wii is the casual gamer. Just look at most of the (good)games so far, the party games dominate.
Just to give you an example, usually when I get my friends over for a few beers we play a sports game like Pro Evolution Soccer, last time they came around I stuck on Wii Sports and we played it for hours while drinking beers. Even some of other wives and girlfriends started playing. Everyone of the non-gamers(or casual gamers) who played thought it was amazing and instantly wanted to buy the Wii. That is Nintendo’s target market, and I bet they make up more of the population than the Hardcore Gamers.
The last thing you want to hear when implementing a design is "ok so what do we have to cut".
That happens in every game even those on the Xbox360 and the PS3, they have to cut something. It is maybe because of time constraints, money, man-power or even technical limitations of the Hardware.
My view is that for too long devs have been focusing on making shinier graphics and they have neglected gameplay. I wish we could go back to the days when gameplay was king, but that is the retro gamer in me speaking. I still have enormous fun when I fire up one of my older games on the Spectrum.
If you look at those old games and compare them to the latest games you realise how much the graphics have evolved but the gameplay has pretty much stayed static.
This comment was edited on Mar 8, 17:56.