The Wiimake

Since day one the Wii has seen ports of the games from the previous generation remade for the Wii. Most noticeably games such as Resident Evil 4 and The Legend of Zelda:Twilight Princess have made the journey over to Nintendo’s motion sensing console to great effect, some have been disappointing and other where an improvement over an already good game. While they keep coming and many of them do sell deep down many Wii gamers are disappointed to see the same thing all over again.

Looking back to 2006 the Wii launched to huge success and all of a sudden found itself in an unpredicted high demand, which Nintendo to this day, well over a year later, are having trouble meeting. Third party developers who had thought little of the console in comparison to the power of the Xbox 360 and PS3 now wanted to jump aboard the Wii and quickly rushed out underdone titles so they could reap some of the benefits of the strong hardware sales. The easiest way to do this was to take an existing title and add in some motion controls, while these where less then impressive nobody can blame them for doing this, developers had to get some games out on the console that was sky-rocketing to the top of the sales charts.

In 2007 the Wiimakes continued to roll in, and this is where Wii gamers must have began to feel a little ripped off as the New Releases weren’t actually so new. One of the biggest criticisms of the Gamecube was that it lacked the strong third party support that the PS2 and Xbox had and Nintendo were relying far too much on their own titles. So far the Big N have attempted to rectify this but have hit a wall due to the Wii’s graphical capabilities. It can be costly for a developer to make a title for just one platform, millions of dollars go into making a game so it makes perfect sense that they want to capitalise on their investment the best way possible and that it to release it to as many people as they can. A game can be developed to be released on the PS3, Xbox 360 and PC, giving the developer access to three different markets while Wii gamers miss out due to technical limitations and a completely different control scheme. Despite this the Wii is pulling out some impressive sales figures, so how does a developer also capitalise on this? It’s simple take an existing game from the previous generation, add on some new controls and release it again. Resident Evil 4 did it successfully and is one of only two games not made by Nintendo to sell over 1 million copies on the Wii (the other being Guitar Hero III). Bully: Scholarship Edition and The Godfather made good use of the Wii controls with an already existing game with a few more missions and yet they are overlooked simply because they’ve been played before. Am I really going to fork out another $80 for a game that I’ve played before with some new controls and a few more levels? Quite frankly no. This is the biggest problem with the Wiimake, it’s not that some of them have been made quite poorly it’s the fact that I’ve been there and done that before with many of the games and was hoping for a completely new experience this generation.



Now well and truly into 2008 it looks as though we may finally be seeing more and more original titles form third party developers and less re-worked games. In fact currently out of the three current generation console the Wii has the most third party exclusive titles and it’s games like the recently revealed The Conduit that is grabbing the attention of more mature aged Wii gamers. It’s games such as No More Heroes that shows the innovation that can be implemented and games such as Zack and Wiki which shows that the top scoring Wii games need not only be titles developed exclusively by Nintendo.

As 2008 and 2009 role along expect to see more original titles on the Wii as developers get a better understanding of how to use the motion controls. Also remember that most quality titles have been in development for many years, Resident Evil 4 was the standout Wiimake released in 2007 but development started back in 1998. Will we ever see the death of the Wiimake? Most likely not due to the fact that games cannot be developed for release across the Xbox 360, PS3 and the Wii. This is not necessarily a bad thing if the game is remade well and with a PS2 gem such as Okami about to be redone perhaps the Wiimake is not that bad after all.