Nintendo Wii Fanboy

Japanese business paper The Nikkei recently published a piece titled Software Houses Miscalculate Audience, Demand For Wii, wherein author Tomoyuki Kawai cites that many inside sources are not looking to the Wii with such a favorable eye any longer. The big worry is that all of this success the Wii has had has only benefited Nintendo and them alone, with many third-party developers jumping on board only to be left with titles on their hands that failed to sell. It's these development studios that are supposedly not profiting compared to their previous year earnings, the result being a lack of support for the console and no desire to commit to it in the future.

The piece goes on to say that a lot of the Wiis picked up by consumers have only started to gather dust (it's unconfirmed if this is the same report we've posted about here earlier).

Say what you will about Majesco's Furu Furu Park, but it's got taste. Taito and 505 Games picked some fantastic games to adapt into minigame versions. If everyone made minigames based on stuff like Cameltry, we would never have a problem with minigames.

We thought it would be useful to post the full list of included games, because we hadn't seen it yet. If at least five of these are fun, we'll consider the game a winner. Arkanoid can't possibly be non-fun, so that's one in their favor!

In our bleak world of cancelled Pocky & Rocky sequels, we must take what we can get. And at the moment what we can get is a Pocky & Rocky-themed shooting minigame. We can smile a little, thinking that there's still some Pocky & Rocky in the world.

[Via press release]

In response to remarks from Steven Kent to USA Today predicting an upcoming Wii bubble burst-- an end to its massive popularity, brought on by a high price relative to its power, Game|Life's Chris Kohler wrote a brilliant editorial looking at what he sees as the four different kinds of gamers (in terms of casual-to-hardcore) and how such a bubble burst would affect them.

Most interestingly, Kohler defines the "casual gamer" not as we do now (non-gamers who enjoy some Bejeweled) but as the majority of the gaming public who buys systems following price drops and owns two or three games. The grandmas and such fit into the "expanded audience." The other two categories, "hardcore gamer" and "kid" are much easier to define.

In Kohler's view, the only audience whose interest in the Wii would be affected by a "bubble burst" would be the casual gamers, who may be more willing to respond to an Xbox 360 price drop than an underpowered Wii. Unless, of course, the Wii gets a bunch of mass-market games.

IGN posted some new screens of Bust-A-Move Bash, and we're really pleased with what we see. It's not, however, for any of the reasons you may think.

The character selection looks great, there are some seriously huge levels (see above) and the 8-player mode is a nice inclusion (we assume it uses four Wiimotes and four Gamecube controllers). We look forward to seeing how the Wii controls work, sure. But out of all the features, what we're really excited about are the very clear, very colorful bubbles. We played a lot of Bust-A-Move 4 on the Game Boy Color, you see, and it got kind of hard to tell the difference between, say, purple and grey, or maybe they were supposed to be different shades of purple, or grey? The point is we couldn't figure it out most of the time. Other iterations of Bust-A-Move have been better about that, but none have shown such beautiful clarity in their bubbles. This is very important!

We've posted some images from the screenshot gallery after the post break. Enjoy easily discerning the colors of the bubbles! Hey Taito, how about a Bubble Bobble game while you're at it? Get the license back from Codemasters.