From December 5th through December 12, Walmart is offering a $50 gift certificate to anyone who buys a $199 Wii (while supplies last). And from now through December 24 they have a few Wii games discounted to $40 (Rock Band: Beatles, Lego Rock Band, MySims: Agents and Mario & Sonic at the Winter Olympics). So you can go to Walmart, buy the console, get the gift certificate, turn around and walk back to Walmart's game section, grab a game and use the certificate! The console offer is in-store only, but you can buy the games online through December 20th.
Sounds like a decent deal to me, although if anyone knows of a better deal, let me know.
Quick takes on games I never reviewed: Ghostbusters, Rune Factory: Frontier, Virtua Tennis 2009, Major Minor's Majestic March, Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's Wheelie Breaker, Vertigo, Hysteria Hospital: Emergency Ward, PDC World Championship Darts, Squeeballs, New Play Control! Mario Power Tennis, Baseball Blast, Madden NFL 10 and Pool Hall Pro.
Read my Unreviews for games released March to October, 2009.
According to Nintendo, as reported by Kotaku, female gamers form about a quarter of the Wii's base, and female gamers prefer the Wii by huge margins (they claim 80% of girl console gamers are going Wii, with the Xbox 360 and PS3 splitting the other 20% between them).
The big questions are 1) why? and 2) how does this effect what games will come out for the Wii?
In terms of why, it might simply be that the Wii isn't seen as a boys club. The 360 and the PS3 both come across as boy toys, full of action games and glistening graphics and high learning curves, high tech marvels offering gritty games that the macho male can use to prove themselves. The Wii, on the other hand, has an "everyone welcome" quality to it. It doesn't ask you to be an experienced gamer who has devoted your life to games and holds a game controller as naturally as an NFL athlete holds a football. It's just supposed to be goofy fun.
Nintendo is also a rather girl-friendly company. A lot of girls fall in love with Mario and Luigi when they're young. They're cute, they're friendly and they never gush blood or chop anyone's head off.
(Certainly there are girls who love big, gritty, blood-drenched action games, and I loooooove those girls, but the big games among women tend to be on a more human scale like Rock Band or The Sims. )
Girl gamers are something all the console makers and many of the game publishers talk about, because they are seen as an untapped source of cash, but Nintendo's friendly, gender-neutral approach to gaming shows that they, unlike Microsoft and Sony, really mean it.
If girls make up a big part of the Wii's fan base, what are game makers going to do about it?
Well, the short answer is, flail around trying a lot of stuff that doesn't work. Expect game designers to try and create more "female-oriented" mini-game collections with titles like "Fashion Designer Xtreme" and "101 Shoe Mini-Games." With a few exceptions like HerInteractive, which has created a nice space for themselves with their Nancy Drew series, most games "designed for girls" are just dumbed down and frilled up.
What game designers really need are good games that have a gender neutral appeal. Games like Guitar Hero and The Sims weren't hits with women because they were trying to win over women, they were just good games that weren't focused on stuff only guys like. The secret to winning girl gamers isn't to make the perfect game, but to simply make a great game that doesn't have a "boys only" sign on the front of it.
Going into a club and being assaulted by the insistent, bone-shaking metronome thump of modern dance music has always struck me as a thoroughly unpleasant experience, so I wasn't especially excited by the prospect of playing DJ Hero, a rhythm game in which players use a turntable peripheral to mix dance music. I was pleasantly surprised; played at a reasonable volume, the game's music mash-ups are interesting, made more so by the game's complex, entertaining gameplay.
Read my review of DJ Hero.
