OMG Nintendo

So when TellTale announced that they had the Wallace and Gromit license, I posted about it. I did this because I, like almost everyone else who saw the announcement, presumed the game would be heading to WiiWare as a successor to Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People. Some sites labeled the original announcement Wii news, or listed the launch assets as Wii assets.

So what do I see earlier this week? An announcement that the Wallace and Gromit game will be going to PC... and Xbox Live. Because, gosh, when I think of playing an adventure game, I think about wrestling with dual analog thumbsticks and multiple shoulder buttons! Rumors had been going around for awhile that certain major "developers" were extremely unhappy with their WiiWare revenue, and I can only imagine Wallace and Gromit on XBLA is the first concrete sign of this.

Face it, Nintendo: you've completely screwed up WiiWare. As one of my many free public services to you, I shall carefully outline the five ways you've managed to do this, and offer common-sense solutions for addressing the main problems where I can. At this point, though, some of the problems are almost intractable. You screwed this one up pretty bad, Nintendo-- so bad it ran guys who publish adventure games off to the competition's inferior controller.

5. The 40 MB File Size Limit

One of Nintendo's biggest mistakes in designing the Wii was opting for only 512 MB of internal storage, and that forced one of basic problems with WiiWare: the 40 MB file size limit for individual titles. Such a sharply restricted filesize makes it pretty difficult to do anything significant with graphics in a WiiWare title (which is why My Life as a King is still pretty much the best-looking game on the service) and also sharply restricts the types of genres most publishers are willing to attempt on WiiWare ('sup, endless stream of interchangeable puzzle games).

Yeah, WiiWare has more than its fair share of games that work within the size limit and still manage to look good and offer full features, but how many major downloadable XBLA and PSN titles have been forced to skip WiiWare distribution over the stupid 40 MB file size limit? How ridiculous is it that Bionic Commando Rearmed would have to ship for Wii as a boxed retail title due to its filesize?

4. No Demos

They say that demos only help sales for good games, and for poor games will actually depress sales significantly. I can believe this is true. On XBLA and PSN, where demos for all titles are freely offered, the cream inevitably rises to the top and browsing the top ten is a great way to find out which games on the service are worth trying out. The current WiiWare selection of most popular titles includes total stinkers like Midnight Bowling, Sandy Beach, and TV Show King. 

I am not convinced that anyone would pick up games like this if they got even a five-minute demo of what they were really getting into before spending their points on it. No, buys of games like the ones above to me smack of people with no other recourse and little information about the games available just downloading based on the genre and obvious kid-friendliness. That doesn't exactly give other developers any incentive to come up with the next World of Goo, as opposed to the next piece of cash-in crap.

3. Unfriendly Payment System

Something that personally bugs the crap out of me when it comes to WiiWare is how needlessly complicated the act of buying a game is. For XBLA and PSN, you just input your credit details once and then buy stuff as you decide you want to play it. Purchasing something involves only a few clicks and maybe a little bit of space-clearing if you have a ton of videos or games installed to your HD already. There's not a lot of friction and getting what you want is easy.

With WiiWare, you have to input all of your credit card details over again, every single time you decide you want to buy more points. And you can't just get more Nintendo Points during a transaction the way you can Microsoft Points in XBLA, you have to leave the game-buying interface entirely to top up your account. If the game calls for more blocks than your Wii has open, you aren't told until you're at the final step of the transaction. Then you have to leave the interface, go through tedious-space clearning measures, and then start trying to buy your game all over again.

2. The Endless Flood of Garbage

I should be happy WiiWare updates with two new WiiWare games each and every week, shouldn't I? And yet I'm not. Most weeks when I check to see what's gone live on the Shopping Channel, the new Virtual Console game is all I'm really interested in hearing about. It's not that I'm a hopeless nostalgic (I'm plenty  hopeful!), it's just that reading descriptions of what Nintendo's chosen to put up in any given random WiiWare week is heartbreaking. The releases seem almost totally random, with no thought put into showcasing titles that should be major, or trying to space

If you're releasing a chapter of Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People, or a World of Goo or a Maboshi's Arcade in a given week on WiiWare... why are you bothering with a release of anything else? XBLA only releases two games in a given week when both titles are nichey in some way. WiiWare constantly releases two games at once, titles apparently selected at random, which only gives the impression that to Nintendo, all WiiWare titles are just interchangeable widgets. Why should WiiWare buyers treat them any differently, then? 

1. Hey, Let's Not Promote Our Online Service!

This absolutely drives me up the wall with Nintendo. Wii is the first Nintendo system to have any sort of significant online infrastructure, and... it's good! Getting a Wii online is a snap, actually a bit easier than getting a PS3 or a 360 configured. The vast majority of Wii owners, however, seem to have no idea that their new Wii Sports machine has any ability to speak to the Internet. This is probably because Nintendo is making absolutely no effort to tell them about it.

I can't think of a single Nintendo TV commercial that's mentioned the Wi-Fi Connection in more than passing detail. Animal Crossing: City Folk's main commercial don't even mention the WiiSpeak peripheral, instead showing a couple of twenty-to-thirtysomethings chatting while they sat in the same room and played a game whose only major new feature involved being able to play online with people. The mass-market Mario Kart commercials did the same. Nintendo clearly puts a lot of effort into supporting online features of their first-party games, so why aren't they promoting them? 

More to the point: if Nintendo won't tell people to go play City Folk or Mario Kart Wii online, why should anyone publishing a WiiWare game expect that Nintendo will try to get people to go online and buy it? The only WiiWare game Nintendo's even promoted at all is World of Goo, and that through system mail. WiiWare is just not going to get better until Nintendo is willing to promote the service with the kind of vigor and effort Microsoft's put behind XBLA. Right now, there is no incentive for anybody - even Nintendo - to put out a truly great WiiWare game.