Industry
Nintendo’s perfect week
I think this week is a great opportunity to reflect on Nintendo’s future. There was the megaton press events in Japan and San Francisco that showed more new content than I think even the big media rags were prepared to see. There was the exhaustive list of third party titles that Nintendo fired off on Thursday to showcase the fact that yes, third parties had signed onto this Wii thing, and t...
Wii owners are irrelevant to ‘enthusiast sites’
Via the NeoGAF forums, courtesy of HylianTom, we have news today that 1up.com is taking a calculated risk and will not be focusing on Nintendo or those people who own its systems. You can judge the grammatically challenged exchange (not because of Tom, as you’ll see) for yourself after the jump.
It’s time to retire game rankings
I doubt they realize what they’ve done. The couldn’t possibly, unless it was some kind of grand satire experiment where they themselves were trying to epitomize — using a mirror — what was wrong with their medium. A certain web site today gave Halo 3 (which I am 100% positive will be amazing for a Halo game) a perfect score. They weren’t the first, and certainly won&#...
Tomorrow in Tokyo
If you are a regular game-blog reader, you may have noticed posts popping up here and there about the Tokyo Game Show in Makuhari (which is actually NOT in Tokyo) this weekend. Well I couldn’t get in for the two industry days (Thurs-Fri), but tomorrow and Sunday they’re letting anybody in! The place is sure to be a complete zoo, with hours of waiting to play the big games of next seaso...
Reggie promises streaming flow of Wii; WiiFit now $99
Nintendo of America’s Reggie Fils-Aime is promising a Wii inventory stream of Flomax proportions this winter to coincide with the holiday season. With every analyst and industry watcher predicting that this holiday will be a megaton event for the entire video games industry in terms of sales, I hope he’s right. System sellers like Smash Bros. Brawl and Super Mario Galaxy are sure to st...
No Wii Sports sequel yet, “too predictable” Iwata says
I don’t know if any of you guys and gals have been following this, but about six months ago Satoru Iwata and Shigesato Itoi, Iwata’s “old friend” from Hobonichi, sat down over take-out for an eleven-part discussion on Nintendo, video games, and everything in between. Today’s segment, “Don’t do the easy,” is something I should have read before posting...
Is the future of gaming “pretty, but shallow?”
Is the excerpt below the future of gaming? Is this more proof that the “next generation” is really just a shiny bookend to the “console wars” and all that that strategy entails? Pluses: Amazing graphics, well-directed cut scenes, “bullet time” shooting sequences. Minuses: Shallow gameplay, not much variety, extremely short. I’m not going to say where this ...
Nintendo’s hands-off approach to Strikers Charged
The Armchair Empire has a very interesting interview up today with Ken Yeeloy, producer, and Mike Inglehart, game designer, both from Next Level games. If you’ll remember, Next Level Games is the developer behind Mario Strikers Charged, a game that I consider a major sleeper hit for the Wii. Why is this particular interview so interesting? Because the two designers give some great insight in...
Iwata: Nintendo must not be arrogant
Anyone who’s followed video games and, by extension, Nintendo for the past 20 years (like the entire senior staff of Infendo, for example) can tell you all about how the house that Mario built became rather arrogant in the 1990’s. It’s not tough to see why this was: Nintendo was enjoying immense success in the industry, and when kids wanted to go play video games at a friend̵...
“The Wii is officially a monster”
N’Gai Croal’s Monday Morning Quarterback email conversations are always enlightening, so it was with some chagrin that I noticed they had not been filtering into the Infendo mailbox for the past three months. Today, however, we get a megaton update that covers basically every base in the video game industry notebook. As is to be expected of me, I gravitated towards the paragraphs that ...
Console war arms race — hurting or helping the consumer?
This console war is truly a slippery slope. On the one hand, people often welcome sharp new graphics and processing speeds with open arms, because we humans absolutely love getting to that next plateau and fulfilling our manifest destiny wherever it may take us. On the other, we have our wallets; those mangy, leather bound bifolded containers of cash that we oft stick on our back pockets, or, if w...
The Wii and the death of ‘traditional analysis’
What to make of analysts these days and their … analysis. More and more, I am seeing myself shrugging off what they say and seeing the light. Why? Because more and more, I see them as (mostly) men who are used to the status quo, and base their analysis on old models. Have I quoted many an analyst in the past to bolster the case for Nintendo? I have, and I am ashamed. No longer though.