In the past five years I’ve been working on such unusual titles like Wii Fit Plus and Wii Sports Resort. Ten years ago I could never have been able to imagine that I would be making games like that. That’s why I can say that the best …
The eater of men, the venerable Mike Tyson, wasn’t on-hand at the British Academy of Film and Television awards show. Just as good — the BAFTA’s media-whoring side step makes the event all the more meaningful, especially to the winners, …
The thing about Wii MotionPlus is that there haven’t been a whole lot of games supporting it. Outside of last summer’s Wii Sports Resort (and upcoming Red Steel 2 and Flingsmash) there’s really only some sports games utilizing the tech. According to a recent interview with Reggie over at MTV Multiplayer, it’s because Nintendo isn’t really pushing for any kind of control scheme from third parties.
“What’s unique with Nintendo is we don’t force our developers to stick to a particular type of control scheme, and you’ve seen that — everything from the new Metroid title to be single remote driven to FlingSmash utilizing the Wii MotionPlus,” he said. “So it’s all about what’s right for the game.” While we’re inclined to agree with the latter part, we still wonder why nothing is using MotionPlus — especially since it’s something that greatly improves the core functionality of the Wiimote. And considering almost everyone has MotionPlus by now (or soon will, if they’re Walmart shoppers looking for a great bundle), why not develop with MotionPlus in mind?
As for more MotionPlus games from Nintendo, Reggie teases “more titles that are coming” and that it “continues to be a core part of what we do.” So, the take away is this: even though Nintendo just released a new piece of hardware, it’s not too worried about supporting it with content — kinda like every other peripheral the company has ever released. Yeah, we’re talking about you, Wii Speak!
Continue reading Reggie: Nintendo doesn’t like pushing control schemes on devs
Reggie: Nintendo doesn’t like pushing control schemes on devs originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 19 Mar 2010 19:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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At last, a new game on the list!
Welcome back to Kotaku’s monthly look at the 10 most avidly-played Wii games, our so-called “measure of pleasure,” that charts which Wii games collect the least dust. Lego Star Wars has fallen to #11 thanks to the arrival of Harvest Moon: Animal Parade. People sure do like playing their Harvest Moon games a lot.
(Click the chart to enlarge)
For many months, the same games have appeared in this top 10, based on data pulled from Nintendo’s official tracking service of Wii users (full explanation of where the numbers come from below). The lack of a new entry has been disappointing, but understandable. These top 10 games each average more than 40 hours per person who plays them. Any new games have a long way to go before they reach that threshold, and some just don’t have enough content to come close.
New Super Mario Brothers, for example, is only at 22 hours per player as of March 1. The surprisingly hot-selling Just Dance has been played, on average, just over five.
The news this month, though, is that a new Harvest Moon, subtitled Animal Parade, has given its players enough of a fever. It cracks the top 10, with a 43-hour, 59-minute average playing time.
Animal Parade knocks Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga off the list. That game ascended to an average playing time of 43 hours and 52 minutes, but was passed by the Animal Parade rocket. Expect Lego Star Wars, which continues to post steady play-time increases, to return in a few months, passing the stagnating or declining likes of Rock Band 2 or The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess. Those games are hovering at close to 46 and 47 hours per player, respectively.
In The Margins
-One game that continues to bear watching is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare: Reflex Edition. The online multiplayer of Call of Duty: World at War has helped that 2008 Wii game to post high numbers on this chart. The 2009 Reflex edition isn’t Top 10 material yet, but in the past four months it has shot up from about 17 hours per player to 32.5, gaining 5.5 of its hours in just the past month. It has a shot of making this list someday.
-Slow and steady but never successful enough to make the Top 10, Mario Kart Wii is about to reach the 37-hour mark. It hit the 36-hour mark over the New Year, making it one of the most-played games on the Wii. That is a great feat for any top-selling game, given how prone the top-sellers are to having some consumers drag the average playing time down.
-No one asked, but Jeep Thrills rose from an average playing time, as of February 1, of 3 hours, 32 minutes, to, a month later, 3 hours, 35 minutes. Who even knew there was a game called Jeep Thrills?
Where’s all this from? (AKA an explanation of the above chart for stat junkies only): In a move somewhat surprising for the generally secretive company, Nintendo makes all of this data public. Any Wii owner can download the Nintendo Channel to their Wii and begin browsing for games. Any game that has been played enough times has usage stats listed for it, contributed by anyone who chose to share their data with the channel. The sample size that the channel tracks is pretty good, though it is obviously biased toward users who hook up a Wii to the Internet. We calculate that sample size by looking at Wii Sports usage numbers, which show that more than 98 million sessions of that game have been played by Nintendo Channel users as of March 1 (up 4 million in the last month), for an average of 29.66 sessions per player. That divides to more than 3.3 million Wii Sports users whose gaming has been tracked by the channel. Since almost all Wii Sports owners in North America would be Wii users, we will venture that as many as 3.3 million people have contributed stats. That is up from the 3.2 million people when these numbers were run for February 1. (October 09 data is not included on the chart due to a problem with Nintendo’s data reporting in the previous month.)
So you sold your Wii three years ago for some reason I’m sure you’ll tell us about in the comments, and now you can’t play New Super Mario Bros. Wii, No More Heroes 2, MadWorld, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories or Wii Sports Resort (or wha…
It doesn’t take a research grant to figure out that exercise — heck, just walking around the block once a day — can have a dramatic effect on a person’s well-being. The problem is that so-called “older adults,” who are particularly prone to a mild but no less debilitating depression known as subsyndromal depression (SSD), are really just too bummed out to do much of anything. Here’s where the grant money comes in: Dilip V. Jeste, MD, and his team of researches at UCSD gathered up 19 seniors diagnosed with SSD and had each of them play Wii Sports for 35 minutes, three times a week.
“The study suggests encouraging results from the use of the exergames,” Dr. Jeste reports. “More than one-third of the participants had a 50-percent or greater reduction of depressive symptoms.” Additionally, most participants claimed that learning to to play those darned vidja games was actually pretty easy — even enjoyable. Uh-oh. Red flag!
You see, had Dr. Jeste continued his study, he might have found that his guinea pigs would soon discover that Wii Sports can easily be played with the slightest flicks of the wrist and, ah yes, it is nice to just sit back on the couch again, but, oh boy, this game is really getting boring, so let me just get on the dag blasted google and see what — here we go — “the best videogame right now,” okay, the yahoo’s answer says: World of Warcraft. Warcraft, eh? That certainly sounds better than bowling. Couldn’t hurt to give it a quick gander … click.
Seniors can be tricked into exercising with video games, study might suggest originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 26 Feb 2010 05:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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GameSpot cornered Nintendo’s Cammie Dunaway in a dimly lit back room at yesterday’s Nintendo Media Summit and pried loose some information about the Wii’s eventual successor. It would seem Nintendo is aiming for PlayStation 2 levels of success with the Wii, which means it’ll be around for quite some time before being ousted by a follow-up system.
“I don’t think it’ll be anytime soon,” she said. “Even though our install base is, at this point, five million households larger than the PS2 install base was at the same point in its life cycle, it still has a lot of room to grow. If you think PS2, there’s been about 50 million sold — Wii close to 28 million sold — so it says to me there’s still a big audience out there that we can access with Wii.” In a less oblique fashion, she added: “We’ll have it ready when we think the time is right.”
The rest of the video is mainly fluff, with Dunaway talking up the large global install bases for the Wii and DS, and Wii Sports Resort’s six million-strong success. The full video is embedded after the break.
Continue reading Dunaway: Wii successor isn’t coming ‘anytime soon’
Dunaway: Wii successor isn’t coming ‘anytime soon’ originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 25 Feb 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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September saw a brief respite from the bad news, but October
brought it in spades for the video game industry.
Sales of video game software dropped 19 percent, compared to
a year ago to $573 million. Hardware was even worse, falling 23 percent
compar…
Look, if people are going to eschew their work day in favor of having a gaming tournament, we’re the first to sympathize. In the case of those in the business of protecting our lives from murderers and financial institutions though, we find it hard to offer much solace. So when eleven officials from several Florida agencies were caught on videotape playing games a couple months back and the story caught on internationally, we were hopeful that those found guilty would maybe, you know, actually receive some form of punishment.
Instead, the Lakeland Ledger reports that the offending officers will suffer such retribution as … a few hours of retraining? The names of the officers are even being withheld due to their “undercover” status at the time. Lakeland sheriff chief of staff Gary Hester goes as far as to say, “We are learning from our mistakes … I think we handled [the investigation] properly.” He then hurriedly rushed back to a game of Street Fighter IV in progress against a competing police department.
… Okay, we made up that last part.
Wii-playing police receive slap on the wrist, strict talking to originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 12 Nov 2009 03:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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I sat in a blue room on Monday, surrounded by what some hardcore gamers might call artifacts of absurdity.
On walls around me hung a Wii bowling ball controller attachment, a Wii pool cue, Wii pom poms, and more.
Who makes this stuff? Two amiable Orthodox Jewish brothers — black pants, white shirts, beards, and an offer to their guest of some kosher pastries — sat across from me, cheerful about what they've built and the amazing gizmos surrounding us.
I was at the second floor offices of CTA Digital, a block from where Brooklyn, New York touches the East River, in a short, aged office building, up an elevator painted with an old yellow floor ad for Domino sugar. I was in the spotless show room where Leo and Sol Markowitz's line of sometimes-ridiculous, sometimes-useful — and apparently hot-selling — attachments for the Wii and other electronics line the walls. (See their offerings online, then imagine that a lot of that is hanging on the walls of one room that’s also big enough for a couple of couches and a big-screen TV.)
The brothers Markowitz are some of the guys who saw in the Wii not just a gamer revolution but a chance to make money selling people things to attach to their Wii remote.
And 200,000 units of their Wii bowling ball controller sold worldwide later, they say, they were pleased to be surrounded by the plastic products of that opportunity.
“We smelled it right away,” Leo told me, recalling his first sensations of the Wii’s imminent success.
The Wii peripheral market is big and, despite other industry slumps, growing. Of the 58.4 million gaming peripherals sold so far this year in the United States, the NPD group reports that 18.4 million of those are for the Wii. That’s up a million from the same date last year.
So even though Sol, an avowed Kotaku reader, playfully cut his brother off early in our meeting about Wii add-ons to remind him that "real gamers don't like the Wii," enough people do like these attachments. They like the tennis rackets and the baseball bats, the imitation light sabers and shotguns. Maybe not the pom-poms — a weak seller — but people like buying Wii peripherals and business is no joke at all. It's good.
CTA has more than 30 employees, a warehouse in upstate New York and design and development teams in Asia. Maybe most importantly, Leo noted, “We have five people who think of things to make 24-7.”
They think of things like… the bowling ball. “Why wouldn’t you buy it?” Leo said to me, when I ask him what the point is. I argued that people had been Wii-bowling with no ball-shaped shell around their controller just fine.
It makes the game fun for plenty of people, Sol said. “It makes it more exciting.” He knows that “real gamers” won’t care as much.
This bowling ball was a dream project, a year in the making and spurred by research that showed them that Wii Sports bowling is the most popular activity on Nintendo’s console.
“We all knew that whoever comes out with bowling, it’s going to be huge,” Leo recalled.
Those CTA engineers got to work, trying to craft a bowling ball something-or-other that could fit around a Wii Remote. They didn’t want people to chuck a bowling ball controller through their TV, so they tried to design a bowling ball shell that wouldn’t function if you didn’t wear the shell’s wrist strap. Couldn’t get it to work right, Sol said. They settled on a design that has two wrist straps and is sealed with a sticker that must be broken in order to first encase a Wii remote in it. You rip that, you assume the risks.
The bowling ball’s good, though it’s holes are positioned only for right-handed bowlers. An ambidextrous design hadn’t worked. But have no fear, fellow southpaws. “We probably will get into the left-handed business,” Leo told me.
I met with the Markowitz men and a helpful colleague for over an hour. Leo repeatedly bounded from his seat on a couch across from me to grab secret prototype after secret prototype of CTA gaming add-ons that will make the bowling ball seem pedestrian. They’re secret still, but they’re wild.
CTA’s been in this business for 16 years, Sol explained. They started with cell-phone add-ons, then moved on to iPod attachments. Now they do gaming add-ons too, like PlayStation 3 chat pads, Xbox 360 cooling devices and iPhone steering wheels. The Wii’s been the big one for them lately, and gaming’s up to a quarter of their business, though they won’t say how much money CTA makes. They sell their attachments worldwide, to electronics stores that once ignored them or shunned gaming.
They say that even Bed Bath & Beyond is on board now. The brothers recalled that the retailer — not exactly a gaming powerhouse — consented last Christmas season to trying to sell 30,000 of CTA's Wii add-ons, simple things like controller charge stations, and sold almost all of them. The retailer asked for more — asked for the top sellers, even. So, the brothers told Kotaku, CTA has sold Beth Bath & Beyond Wii Sports kits to sell and even a Wii controller shotgun. No word if it's sold next to shower curtains.
Leo showed me a smart one: A belt and holster designed to hold a Wii Remote for users of Wii Fit. He rightly pointed out that the game requires players to use the Remote to start their exercising but then forces them to either put it down or needlessly hold it as they work out on the Wii Balance Board. The holster holds the Remote, freeing the user’s hands. And it swivels, letting someone point the Remote to navigate menus without having to un-holster it. That seemed to address a Wii Fit user interface issue.
I asked the brothers if they saw themselves as being in the problem-solving business, the fun business or — gesturing to the Wii Music Kit that lets you embed the Wii remote into shells shaped like a violin, a trumpet, a dog paw — the novelty business.
“We see what the problem is [with a game] and figure out what we can make for it,” Leo began.
“We are in the fun business,” Sol cut in.
Leo laughed. “We’re in the business to sell and make money.”
CTA’s bowling ball controller may make the company stand out, but they are not the only creators of imaginative Wii add-ons. Mad Catz makes controller shells shaped like Ubisoft’s Rabbids characters. Nyko director of marketing Chris Arbogast told Kotaku that one of his company’s most creative Wii add-ons was going to be their Party Station: “a combination charging station / beverage container / chip bowl.” It’s not coming out. “Although it generated a lot of buzz and consumer response, it was not cost effective to produce and was tabled.”
Arbogast noted that some of the more imaginative controllers, while fun or aesthetically pleasing don’t fit his company’s strategy. “We decided on particular accessories that allowed us to incorporate new technology or offer features that were not previously available, like button relocation on our Action Pak pistol grip or rumble in our Kama.” Their next big product is their new Charge Base IC.
CTA is well aware that some of this wilder stuff doesn’t work. The Wii Music kit has been a slow seller, not helped by relatively slow sales of the Wii Music.
The brothers seem undeterred. They say that their new Wii Sports Resort kit, which includes a bow-and-arrow add-on, a Jet-Ski-style handlebar and even a frisbee shell, is selling great.
And don’t worry, those of you who might feel you’re too cool for these kinds of attachments. Leo and Sol are making some products for you in mind too. Just wait. Brooklyn’s keeping busy.
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