Aside from the one or two new innovations we have seen from Nintendo themselves (Wii Fit, Wii Music, and Wii Sports), the Wii is a garbage dump of shovel-ware. Instead of focusing on high quality games, we see Ubisoft shit out a new Petz or Animalz or Prostitutez. Why? Because they see casual gamers eating this shit up in barrels.
And yet you still manage to miss my point: that by your logic (new gamers =
n00bz = shitty games) the release of any titles or consoles in the past which helped spur the commercial growth of the game industry was inherently bad, because it encouraged the release of
shovelware which appealed to
mainstream tastes. Unfortunately, at best the sentiments you're expressing suggest a troublous relationship with reality, as the game industry - and I understand that certain periods yielded better games than others - has generally managed to become more diverse and improve in spite of having continually become more commercial.
I have no doubt that the Wii already has and will have a profound influence on the industry. Of course, you seem to be under the assumption that any influence is necessarily a good influence. I praised the Wii early on in it's life-cycle due to the innovative controls that it brought, but have quickly come to realize that these innovative controls have largely been ignored by third-party developers and only Nintendo has occasionally stepped up to the plate to use these innovative controls in interesting ways.
I remember saying early on, when I first heard news of the Wii's control scheme, that the risk of pursuing it was that Nintendo would alienate third-parties who wanted to cheaply and easily port games (which has now become the bread and butter of the industry). So much for console customization.
But in any case, I wouldn't neccessarily assert that the influence of the Wii is negative. I say this because I find the presumption elitist that what's positive is consoles which appeal to an 'installed' user base: by contrast, I think it's possible that by opening the demographic floodgates, and revitalizing interest in simplist design, the Wii has provoked a major re-thinking of the way games are developed and who they appeal to, which could help get them off the 'beaten path' they've slavishly followed since atleast the sixth generation. This re-thinking, I should add, has nothing to do with
Bratz or
Petz or
Prostitutez: those are simply growth pains, which attest to the impossibility of successfully diverging from industry formula overnight - handheld gaming wasn't exactly a golden pantheon when the
Game Boy was first released, was it?
I don't hate kids, it's just their under-developed taste for entertainment tends to put out pretty bad stuff.
Again, your logic is inconsistent. Alot of kids owned the NES when it released the likes of Mario Bros., Zelda, Dragon Quest and Metroid. "Maturity" is in no way synonymous with "quality", nor even the ability to discern what media is worthwhile:
Toy Story, for example, is still a categorically "better" movie than alot of the bullshit that adults watch. Children know as well as anyone else when they're dissatisfied with what they're playing.
