as a separate post, so as to not get lost in the above discourse...

there has only been one gaming system i've ever seen or heard of that has actually gotten massive amounts of the elderly (grandmothers who've never enjoyed playing a video game before in their life!) to buy it for themselves, and that's the Wii.

parents love it for their children because it actually gets them up off their asses and has them move around rather than just sit there. they're actually often close to exhaustion when they're done.

so many of the standard late-teen and adult gamer market enjoy playing even some of the more "childish" games than the flashy, Teen and M-rated fare on other systems because it's actually fun to play, recapturing the days of their youth on the early generations of systems. i myself honestly have nowhere near as much fun playing the games of the last decade compared to the glory days of the NES and Sega, or the Super Nintendo or Genesis.

and children have always been a core constituent of Nintendo's market because Microsoft and Sony all but abandon that age group. when coupled with their parents exuberance over how active it makes them is pure profit margin.

that's it's power. there is no generation gap. people of every age group want a Wii. more people have more fun and care more about that than crappy games with flashy graphics. interactivity in a tangible, physical sense is the future of gaming. the Wii has it. and it's flooding Nintendo with profit.

Im happy with my Ps3, which i partially got for the blu-ray then now for the next gen games.(snagged up one of the last of the 60g .. backwards compatable ftw) I avoided the 360 since well 95% of whats coming out on that is coming out on what im writing this with and well i just cant support M$ ive been a computer geek/gamer for too long to realize what a nessasary evil it is for my day. The Wii .. ive pondered getting one, once they drop in price and maybe hit the next gen for the novelty, but i dont see myself in a frenzy, its a party machine, i dont have the time or energy to flail around sittin in my room durin my r&r period after work and have to cull out all the pokemon and related kiddie dumbed down anime converted to VG carts to find a good game
*heh* jus my rant , though , as an old NES boy i still miss link and samus

The funny thing is we have had wiis in stock here before and after christmas. I suspect being sold out in the US is a lame marketing ploy.

Aww, shucks.

-TM

doubtful, as it's also usually sold out in Japan, too. even up in Alaska, we get them fairly frequently, and they always fail to last the day, most times the hour, even on slow days.

if we got 30 of the suckers in today, they'd all be gone by the time I leave for the day. and it's dead in here due to a big snowfall last night continuing still.

yeah, I'm posting from my iTouch while on break.

You're making a whole boatload of assumptions there, based on your personal preferences, most of which a cursory glance at a list of top-selling videogames over the past decade proves wrong.

Personally, I think that wallowing in too much nostalgia and thinking that simplistic games geared towards children or a retro audience are inherently better than complex games or games for mature audiences is a great way to retard the advancement of videogames as an art form, but I hate fun.

It's funny to see you simultaneously dismiss the past decade or more of technological innovation in the videogame industry as just "crappy games with flashy graphics", but laud motion sensing controllers as "the future of gaming".

Article from NYTimes about HD-DVD companies opening up to Blu Ray.

I love my Wii.


That is all.

actually i'm going off of everybody i've talked to who has played a Wii's opinion. and i'm not even coming close to saying that simple, childish games are the best. what i am saying is that almost everybody i've talked to in that age group who have played a Wii and really enjoyed it (the vast majority) have said, and i quote, "i haven't had this much fun playing a video game since i was a kid."

see, i'm not talking about the actual content of the games, themselves, i'm talking about the experience people are having while playing Wii games. sorry if my post was a bit confusing about that.

and if you "hate fun," why do you play video games? isn't fun/entertainment/enjoyment (all the same thing) really the reason to play any of them?

sure, there have been some good games in the last decade. i don't deny it. didn't really mean to with my above post. kind of got caught up in the moment, my bad. the Halo series are some of the big ones. Metal Gear Solid 2 lost me 20 straight hours of my life, and it was great. and i used to fiend to play Mario Sunshine, so, yes, there are some good games out, but there have been so goddamn many games that garnered lots of hype and showed a lot of promise only to end up all flash and no substance. and so very many games were a quick play through that was somewhat decent, but gave no reason to play them again. the vast majority of games that i, my friends, and a good number of people i've talked to have played over the last decade have left us with a "meh" sort of feeling, "but it looked nice."

i've just really found it hard to keep stomaching shelling out $50-60 bucks to be disappointed with most of the games i've bought. i just can't afford to sift through all of the swill to find those really good games, and most of the people out there i've noticed and talked to seem to be in the same boat. and the actual cost of the systems is almost nuts. and the PlayStations and X-Boxes aren't for everybody. and, really, neither is the Wii. but the Wii grabs more of the population and makes them want to play it than any other game system has, every. by a huge percentage.

and yes, the ability to pretend to physically interact with the game environment, whether it's thru motion sensing controllers, virtual reality gear, or a complex application of holograms and artificial force fields manipulated so as to make the user think he or she is actually touching something that's not really there. sales and the consumer market are showing that people seem to care more about interactivity than flashy graphics, at least here in the US and in Japan.

the Wii didn't really take off until after it had been out and people had played it, remember.

I think whether the motion controls make a big difference will depend almost entirely on the designers of the games that come out for Wii. Like I say, I have not personally played any of the flagship "gamer's games" for Wii like Zelda or Mario Galaxy or Super Paper Mario. I will reserve some judgment until I've seen what is theoretically the pinnacle of Nintendo's own output for the system. But I wasn't impressed by Wii Sports or the other mini-game collections I've played using the controls, and they've been games built specifically around using the motion controls. I find them imprecise and often unintuitive, and I regularly got tangled in the cord between the nunchuk and the Wiimote during more vigorous motions. I have a really hard time envisioning them working well with any of the sorts of games I have hitherto enjoyed, which would, if true, mean that people would likely have to come up with entirely new game concepts at rates that I think are extremely unlikely to happen.

We still don't have that much true use of the DS's unique capabilities, and they're a lot less tricky or innovative than the Wii controller.

I own a Wii, and I feel like the games on it are nothing that couldn't be done last gen. The only difference is the gimmicky motion control that's thrown into most games to help them sell. If Nintendo would release their franchises on the 360 (minus whatever control gimicks they threw in) , I would have absolutely no reason to own a Wii. Really, the only reason I have on is that it's the only option to play Mario, Metroid and Zelda.

The ironic part is that if they had not included Blu-ray playback (as Microsoft didn't include HD-DVD playback) they might have had a much better chance at winning the console war at the cost of the HD format war.

I own one console, an N64 I haven't touched in years. The only game that has interested me in the last five years was Portal, and I didn't have to buy anything else to play it.

As an update, I did this. I actually went through with it and kept a straight face (even on the phone it was difficult). Here's a small, somewhat accurate recap of how the conversation went. . .

Me: (pick up phone) Electronics (see, I don't give my name here because if I piss someone off I don't want them to be able to name me.)

Dude: Do you have any Nintendo Wiis in stock?

Me: No sir.

Dude: Do you know when you'll be getting any in? (seriously, this was just the line I was waiting for out of all the calls I got for the Wii that day)

Me: Never.

Dude: Huh? (I could hear his bafflement on the on the other line wondering if he had heard me correctly)

Me: We won't be getting anymore shipments of Wii systems in the store. Nintendo has decided to discontinue the product.

Dude: Are you shitting me?

Me: I wish I were. We were just informed ourselves last evening before the store closed.

Dude: What the fuck. You've got to be fucking with me. That's fucking stupid. Why the fuck would they do that? FUCK! (Yeah, he screamed into the phone)

Me: I'm sorry.

Dude: What the fuck and I supposed to do now? I've been trying to get a fucking Wii since before Christmas and now I'm being told that they fucking discontinued it. *growl/scream* (I really have no idea how to explain the noise he made that made me pull the phone away from my ear)

Me: My suggestion is that you try Craigslist or eBay. I'd do it quickly if you want one. As soon as the news gets out to the public you'll be hard pressed to find one anywhere.

(I have to note here that there were other customers standing near me listening to the entire conversation, granted it was only my end of it except when they heard him scream, and my co-workers were nearly rolling on the floor in hysterics)

Him: Oh! Good idea! (I could hear the excitement in his voice and I nearly lost it) *click*

He actually hung up on me before I could tell him it was a joke. I wonder if he actually got one off of eBay.

When you work for the crappy company that scylis and I work for, you're always in the market for a new job.

you're my new hero.