Welcome to 2009! It's a New Year, which means New Year's Resolutions, which usually means following up a few good days of boozing and partying with weeks of wallowing in your own poor self-esteem. Of course, if you're feeling pretty good about yourself, well, your New Year's Resolution tends to be something stupid like "Eat more roughage " or " Floss regularly" that is not really addressing any major problems of yours that might exist.
Nintendo, for instance, has to be flyin' high right now. The company is more profitable than ever, and is selling both the top console and a portable that's more ubiquitous than even the GBA. Nintendo has no reason to think it's doing anything wrong as a company, despite having pissed off more of the gaming internet than Electronic Arts, Activision Blizzard, and UGO combined. Nintendo did a lot right in 2008, but there's a lot they could be doing more... uh, righter in 2009. Since I don't have to deal with the contact high of having sold four million new consoles in two months, I figure I'm as qualified as anybody to tell Nintendo what its New Year's Resolutions for 2009 oughta be.
10. Make the Wii software library more like the DS software library. The Nintendo DS has about the best selection of games and interesting non-games you could ever want. You can play a million billion different great games that cater to a wide variety of different tastes and genres. Right now, Wii's major problem is that most of its games are over-focused on a handful of types: first party Nintendo crowd-pleasers, lame knockoffs of first-party Nintendo crowd-pleasers, 3D action titles for kids, and... then, like, about 10% of the library remains for miscellaneous stuff . A major goal for Nintendo in 2009 needs to encouraging more developers of every size and stripe to commit themselves to Wii projects. The DS really took off once it developed a strong mid-list of appealing titles like Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow to complement the Nintendogs and Animal Crossings, and Wii needs roughly the same sort of thing to cement its large install base into a PS2-style gaming juggernaut.
9. Get more Western developers making Wii games. The best game on WiiWare right now is World of Goo, which is the result of two guys making a PC game themselves. It only ended up on WiiWare because Iwata and Miyamoto played a demo at a show and found themselves really liking it. My question is, why hasn't this bloomed into the World of Goo devs making a full retail title for Wii? Why isn't Nintendo scouting for more gems like World of Goo from the Western indie game PC dev community? A lot of low-budget PC projects have the gameplay shine required to go over to the Wii, and aren't resource-intensive enough to make the ports difficult. Nintendo, even if it means giving some indie Western devs truckloads of money and as many as a dozen interns each, get them making more games for your system.
8. Take the Shopping Channel seriously. Right now a lot of what goes up on WiiWare is such a joke, half the titles don't get reviewed anywhere for any reason. Half the titles are total mobile phone ripoff garbage, cruddy puzzle games, or gameplay premises so thin that even the developer didn't want to try to get away with it in box copy form. Likewise, while the occasional gem hits Virtual Console, a lot of stuff has hit this year that's a total waste of time, or outright unplayable (to the tune of Operation Wolf). Nintendo really, seriously, absolutely has to stop treating the Shopping Channel offerings so offhandedly. Not only will it eventually discourage your Capcoms and TellTale Gameses from putting serious effort into releases for WiiWare, but it'll eventually lead to people just not being interested in what's gone up on the Shopping Channel anymore. There's no excuse for months to go by with nothing half-decent on Virtual Console, and given the massive pool of games licensed for Nintendo to release already, blame for the long runs of crap games rests entirely on its shoulders.
7. Don't be afraid to let Mario and Zelda take a rest. The GameCube years were lean ones, and pumping out tons of Mario and Zelda stuff was probably necessary to keeping Nintendo profitable despite trailing badly in the console market. Now the DS is a huge success on the strength of third-party software and the biggest hits for the Wii don't feature Mario or Zelda. With no financial need to keep cranking out more entries in these series, Nintendo shouldn't hesitate to give them a rest, or to let their games develop in a slow and deliberate fashion if need be. There's no need to rush out a new Zelda game in 2009, and a long wait after Galaxy until the next major Mario title would be fine by me. With the new expanded Wii audience, Nintendo instead has a tremendous chance to develop new franchises and give other franchises from the Nintendo back catalog new opportunities to shine.
6. Keep pushing the envelope. Nintendo has spent 2008 consistently publishing software so innovative that it forces people to reconsider their definition of what a game even is. In some cases, Nintendo has outright managed to make non-game software into a big perennial seller, and forced an industry-wide dialogue about what a game system really can (and can't) be. Right now the gaming community is in a place it's never been before, watching the Wii a system that breaks all rules of what long-time fans expect in a successful console rush past the fan-friendly Xbox 360 to financial dominance. As far as I'm concerned, this is nothing but good for games, gaming, and especially gamers. In 2009, Nintendo needs to keep pushing the envelope the way they have throughout 2008, even if it means confounding everyone with another bizarre creature like Wii Music.
5. Don't be afraid to step up and publish. Some of Nintendo's cleverest moves in 2008 were as the publisher of someone else's games. They've brought countless gems to the Wii by assuming publisher duties for WiiWare titles like World of Goo and Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People, and made an extremely smart move by bringing Level-5's Professor Layton series to the US with a fantastic localization. Even publishing Arika's Endless Ocean was a gutsy move, forcing a lot of journalists to entirely re-evaluate the basic idea of what qualifies as a game while also making a type of experience available that was unlike anything a lot of Wii owners had seen before. In 2009, I would love to see more of Nintendo collaborating with smaller developers like Arika, Level-5, and 2D Boy, giving small but creative studios the benefit of Nintendo's considerable marketing muscle.
4. Stop ignoring complaints. The Wii is a huge success, yes, and all most people want out of it is a steady stream of games they can play with their kids: Wii Sports, Mario Kart, Wii Play. Wii Sports Resort is probably going to be the smash hit of 2009, just based on this audience alone. Still, in 2008 Nintendo started displaying the sort of corporate arrogance that hurt the company badly during the 16-bit era. This is not a place for Nintendo to go. In 2009, Nintendo has to be willing to listen to and seriously regard complaints from longtime fans who want to like the Wii but basically can't. Nintendo especially needs to listen to complaints about the usability of the Wi-Fi Connection, the lack of variety in the Wii library right now, and the lack of major titles to interest devoted action and RPG gamers. Relying on nothing but ports and family-friendly stuff amounts to chasing the short-term dollar instead of investing in the future.
3. Keep ignoring the haters. An inevitable part of Nintendo's revolution in gaming is that, inevitably, devotees of the old order are going to resist change. Some people don't want girls, parents, and the elderly gaming alongside them, or want to see motion-based party games start outselling much-hyped blockbusters like GTAIV, Gears of War II, and even Fallout 3. These people are well within their rights, and I'm even a little sympathetic. Seeing the dawn of the gaming console as HD entertainment hub stalled out by the success of a console that doesn't display above 480p has to be frustrating. That said, one mistake Nintendo cannot make in 2009 is investing undue time or effort into bringing gamers to Wii who are simply never going to be interested. Put simply, Wii is never going to be a better platform for any graphics-intensive game genres than the 360 or PS3. While Nintendo needs to stop alienating the core gamer, Nintendo also can't make the mistake of investing in a massive battle with Microsoft for the core gamer's attention. That's a fight Nintendo should know it can't win until at least the next hardware generation.
2. Build new franchises and resurrect forgotten ones. Nintendo holds the rights to a lot of IP from the its 8-bit days that gamers still really love. A lot of the popularity of Smash Bros. Brawl is unquestionably because the game is such a thorough celebration of every obscure detail of Nintendo's publishing history. Now that Nintendo has a comfortable lead over the competition, the time is right to start developing new IP and resurrecting older ones that haven't been trotted out in at least ten or fifteen years. The new Punch-Out!! is a move in the right direction, and a new Kid Icarus game would definitely energize fans. It's also time to think about bringing back even the likes of Molemania and Devil World. More experiments in the vein of the Art Style games and a US release for Captain Rainbow would make 2009 just about perfect.
1. Streamline the Wi-Fi Connection. I've complained about this before on this list, but I'll do it again just because it's such a tremendous issue. Right now, using the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection is ridiculously complicated. DS demands that configure your online settings through each individual game, while Wii makes you wrestle with friend codes and then additional game-specific friend codes. A few titles on each system have decent random matchmaking, but just settling down to play with your friends is harder than it should be. There's no excuse for the service being this rough when the 360 is thriving in large part due to the strength of how easy it is to use Xbox Live. I'm not saying Nintendo should rip that service off wholesale, in part because I know Nintendo wouldn't, but that level of user-friendliness needs to what Nintendo aspires to with the Wi-Fi Connection in 2009.
