Man, that was a great video.

5 for Girls!

Yeah, it's otherwise very difficult to find sexy videos of girls on the Internet.

If Yahtzee saw bowling on fire, he would not piss on bowling to put it out.

So great is his disdain for bowling.

Bowling requires exertion.



?

Hey man, those pitchers of Coors Light ain't gonna carry themselves.... unless there's a waitress at the bar to do it for you while you throw your 10th straight 8 point frame.

A 0 system to poorly replicate something that you can do very easily and fairly cheaply "IRL?" Nah.

It's a great party game, if you're either twelve or have terrible parties.

His argument is two-fold.

One is that he feels motion controls in general, an on the Wii in particular, suffer from lacking any sort of tactile feedback. While you can see or hear what happens, any immersion gained from the controls is lost without such feedback.

Two, the Wii's tendency to cater to shallow gameplay mechanics such as the Wii Sports is bad because it's a shortcut to making money which ultimately damages the medium in the long run since "real" (whatever that means) innovation is stymied in lieu of easy money.

I sort of buy argument one, argument two is kind of a wash, as there are some (not nearly enough) Wii games like No More Heroes to keep me interested. Besides, the real heart of the Wii in my opinion is the VC/Wii-ware.

I look forward to new innovations in "embarrassment-challenging" games.

He articulated it just as Ranma said in the vid, which you don't seem to have watched.

No matter who you ask, "Real" innovation always means "more of the type of games that I personally like."

The whole "casual gamers are ruining gaming" argument is ridiculous for three reasons:

1) It's far, far older than the Wii. In fact it tends to pop up every other generation or so. The aging crop of gamers take a "YOU DAMN KIDS GET OFF MY LAWN" attitude toward the newer bunch, and their console of choice gets labeled "casual" and decried as the ruination of the industry. The die-hard Atari fans made the same argument toward the NES, the die-hard Nintendo fans made the same argument toward the PS1, and now here we are.

2) It hinges on the idea that the Wii's abundance of terrible shovelware is diverting resources from quality game design, as if shovelware came from great developers who were being creatively compromised and not the absolute dregs of the industry. For this argument to work, you have to believe that if the companies behind Cereal Mascot Racing and Family Minigame Jamboree 5 were developing for a console without waggle, they'd have each cranked out the next Portal by now.

3) The idea that playing a game casually is bad betrays a fundamental failure to understand what the word "game" means.

The Wii strikes me as the Perfect Strangers of video games. Lots of people eat it up, but it's still an endless supply of garbage.

"For this argument to work, you have to believe that if the companies behind Cereal Mascot Racing and Family Minigame Jamboree 5 were developing for a console without waggle, they'd have each cranked out the next Portal by now"

Exactly. If you come out and say "Okay, no more shallow, family-friendly bowling games" (or whatever), the money currently being made off those doesn't magically get diverted to Final Fantasy XXXXVII or whatever because "games is games." Instead of whatever types of games Yahtzee likes getting a bigger piece of the industry pie, they just end up with the same size slice of an overall smaller pie. Nobody wins anything in that case.

May I just say that I like this discussion because it addresses two Wii games that I cannot wait to play:

Cereal Mascot Racing
Perfect Strangers

Holy fuck I can't wait to play Balki.

The problems with the Wii are a little difficult to put your finger. All I know is thus (since we are doing the numbered list thing):

1. I like video games
2. I own a wii, and no other current consoles
3. I don't enjoy any of the games for wii. (Well maybe I like one of them.)
4. Just about any Wii game might as well be a flash game.

It seems like developers had a really hard time working around the shitty hardware of the console, so all of their efforts went into making controls that didn't entirely suck. Usually in vein.

Also Nintendo seems to only give out licenses to games that won't offend anyone.

If "motion" is your goal, to make the gamer feel like they're hitting a ball or swinging a sword, having no "thwack" kind of leaves the experience half-full. At least with a button, when you want your character to punch something, he punches when you hit "A."

Not so the Wiimote. It's a highly inaccurate beast when you aren't using the buttons, and it's difficult to know if you're waggling it properly or improperly to get the game to acknowledge your input.

As for the "shortcut to making money," keep in mind that us Wii owners already own half of the games this package has as they CAME WITH THE CONSOLE. "Risk" is different from "Axis and Allies," and I'll pay a shitload less for a "Risk" game (unless it's a special version) for good reason. I'd also defy you to find a Wii game that (1) had as much thought or playtesting put into it as "Risk" and (2) didn't use the Wiimote motion-gimmick to make it more difficult to accomplish something that could just have easily been covered by pushing the "A" button.

"As for the "shortcut to making money," keep in mind that us Wii owners already own half of the games this package has as they CAME WITH THE CONSOLE."

Rehashing an older game? WELL I NEVER

"No More Heroes" was one of the better games, but it also highlighted some of the Wii's weak points:

1. Waggling the Wiimote for combos was a crap-shoot at best. It was very hard to tell when I was doing it properly and when the Wii decided I wasn't using enough wrist-action or whatever it was looking for.
2. The hardware limitations were really evident. All non-boss enemies were the same set of polygons and that "dark shadow" effect to hide the lack of processing power started to be quite tiresome.
3. I don't know if the Wii's setup is to blame per se, but how many random bonus attack-powerups have you received when you downed the last enemy and the game won't let you progress to the next section until it's finally worn off?

I didn't like no more heros. I really wanted to because I loved Killer 7.

It tried to do a whole bunch of different things (mostly things that other games had already done), but ended up doing them poorly.
- The Waggle controls pissed me off
- The working minigames got really annoying
- I have no idea why collecting all of the clothes is supposed to be fun, but it's not
- The drive-around-the-city thing was really poorly put together and altogether unnecessary
- Honestly, I feel like it was stylistically ugly and stupid

The one truely good game for the Wii is Smash Brothers Brawl, and that is definitely a "if you like that sort of thing" game.