Monday, September 18, 2006

Game Informer Wii Article

I'm sure many of you have read Billy Berghammer's "Will Wii Be Disappointed Again?" article on Game Informer this weekend. Before I get into it I would like to point out today's post on Penny Arcade. In the last paragraph, Tycho talks about the article and points out something that many people may not know: Billy used to run Planet GameCube.

I've met Billy on a few occasions, but I doubt he remembers me much. I used to know a few people from Game Informer since it is a magazine based here in Minneapolis (I think it is the only major gaming magazine not located on a coast once EGM left Chicago for San Francisco). The last time I remember seeing Billy was at the Cube Party I covered for Console Gold in 2002.

Anyway, I don't want to get too off-track. Much like Tycho I have to believe this was pretty hard for Billy to write. He is one of the biggest pro-Nintendo people I know, but in the end his words do ring true. Nintendo will have only 2 launch titles at release, one of which is a GameCube title that has been re-jiggered on the Wii (The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess). There is also no Mario game and I was disappointed to hear there wouldn't be a Metroid game either, no matter how much I hated the scanning needs in the previous 2 games on GameCube.

There is also a good chance that 3rd parties could go the way of the dodo bird a while after launch. Billy also makes a good point that if multi-platform games start to take on the "portability" factor and are not built ground-up on the Wii that the versions of those games will pale in comparison to the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions. It takes less money to make a port than it takes to build the game separate from the other versions. Will companies take the cheap way out or will they continue with what they're doing here at launch? We'll just have to see.