THQ's Neighborhood Games isn't one of those games that's bad because nobody involved really cared about what they were doing. THQ's PR department sent it to me twice, they wanted it covered so bad. Still, the game is pretty deeply and fundamentally flawed.
Neighborhood Games is a family mini-game collection of the sort that mimics Wii Sports, but it's not really good at any of the things that make Wii Sports appealing. The controls are stiff and it's hard to control how hard you're throwing any given ball or dart or whatever, especially in the basketball games. Most of the games use the same motion input, but some are harder to play than others because of glitches in the on-screen character's throwing animation.
Neighborhood Games advertises twenty-four minigames, but they're all variations on a handful of basic games that boil down to only two or three different types of control input. There are unlockables and a single player mode and customizable avatars, but none of it is really appealing. There's none of the pick-up-and-play friendliness of Wii Sports, but no real depth either.
Most attempts at family mini-game collections turn out like Neighborhood Games, so I actually don't think THQ put in an especially bad effort here. I think the real problem is inherent in the genre. All Wii mini-game collections want to be Wii Sports and want to appeal to people who like Wii Sports, but only a handful of these games have achieved even a significant fraction of Wii Sports's success. There's something important about the family mini-game genre that non-Nintendo developers can't quite grasp yet.
To understand why most third-party attempts at family mini-game collections turn out bad, you need to understand that the video games industry, generally speaking, has no use for originality. Original games are hard to market, hard to sell, and frequently hard for gamers used to established genre formulas to play. People want more of what they like already, and most third parties get by comfortably on giving it to them.
Nintendo, by contrast, has always been a company about trying to invent entirely new software genres they can use to drive hardware sales. They invented the 2D and 3D platformers as we know them with Super Mario Bros. and Mario 64, they pioneered the falling block puzzle genre with Tetris, they pioneered the "productivity" game with Brain Age, they even made the first truly successful console RTS title in Pikmin.
Selling originality is hard, and Nintendo knows this. That's why there's an extraordinary emphasis on polish and presentation in virtually every first-party Nintendo product. They know the game is going to live or die on how well Nintendo can use marketing and in-game tutorials to convince players to invest themselves in something new, instead of another interchangeable FPS or RPG.
It is the polish of Wii Sports that made the game capable of attaining the mainstream appeal it found. The Miis are simple, but reflect your motions made with the Wii Remote perfectly. Neighborhood Games's avatars may be customizable, but also suffer from animation glitches that negatively impact the gameplay. There are only five games in Wii Sports, but they all offer fundamentally different types of motion input for the gameplay. All of the Neighborhood Games activities feel basically the same to play, and in a bad way.
When an original idea in gaming is presented to people in a polished way, it tends to take off big. It will attract people willing to play games who weren't interested in more of the same. Nintendo excels at making this happen, but they're not the only ones who can do it. Activision and Harmonix managed it with Guitar Hero, Namco did it with Katamari Damacy, Majesco even managed it with Cooking Mama. That first big hit establishes the template. Then the third parties move in to try and capitalize on the new genre template, either executing better-polished versions or trying to find new features they can add to the formula.
Wii Sports created the family mini-game collection's template, but many of the basic key characteristics of that template are counter-intuitive and probably hard for third parties to grasp. Third-party family mini-game collections are frequently unpolished instead of responsive, ugly instead of clean, and needlessly complex instead of simple.
They miss almost every aspect of what gives the family mini-game collections appeal, and so of course the final software turns out lumpy and malformed. The developers don't really understand what they're doing, yet. The Wii Sports genre formula is so new that no developer outside of Nintendo can possibly have internalized it yet, the way I'm sure many developers have internalized how to make FPS and RPG gameplay "feel right".
Even if developers start to really understand the family mini-games formula, the fact remains that creating a product that's polished to Nintendo's standards is going to be very hard. Most companies trying to make their own family mini-game collections are trying to produce them on low budgets and rapidly, because the genre looks cheap and simple to make. The dozens of nearly unplayable family mini-game collections sitting on store shelves now are a testament to how untrue this assumption is.
Consider the first time Nintendo established a whole new genre with a mega-selling pack-in title, Super Mario Bros. For years after its release, developers rushed to get games that played almost the exact same way onto shelves, and almost all of them have been entirely forgotten. Most of them were horrible messes with bad level design and unresponsive controls. The only games that really stood out were ones like Castlevania and Mega Man were willing to polish the controls until they were responsive and predictable while also using the graphics and gameplay to give the game a unique feel.
Relative to when Wii Sports kicked off the family mini-game collection genre on Wii, I think we're still trapped in the first wave of direct clones. A few games have managed to capture a bit of what players liked so much in Wii Sports, namely Raving Rabbids and Carnival Games, but even those have some problems. For the most part, developers don't yet have the ability to crank out a game that controls as perfectly as Wii Sports, the resources to make their avatars as appealing as the Miis, or the ability to understand what they can add to the formula that buyers will actually want. Right now everyone is still playing catch-up.
It's logically impossible that we'll be stuck with nothing but Wii Sports clones forever, though. As long as the genre sells, third parties have incentive to eventually figure out what can work and how they can reinvent the genre to make buyers want their games. It might happen in 2009, especially if Wii Sports Resort takes off. It might take longer, but if motion controllers show up as part of the console specs for the next Xbox and PlayStation iterations, developers will really have no choice but to finally get things right.
The game industry generally doesn't like new ideas, and the mini-game collection is a radical new idea, one that totally throws out all conventional notions of what makes a game good. It reduces gameplay to simple amusement, usually derived from the motion controls and competition against other players in the same room.
Western developers especially have been trained toward ever-increasing emphasis on depth, length, and immersion in gameplay, so of course they can't make good mini-game collections right out of the gate Of course, me-too Japanese developers who've largely been reissuing the same games with slightly different graphical skins for the past fifteen years can't get it right, either.
Yet.
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