Last night Nintendo announced their new WiiWare lineup (as well as showing off some of their normal software that is coming up). I must say I am pretty impressed over all, however I think pricing may be interesting to say the least. The games that I can recall off hand include a Pokemon Farm which allows you to upload pokemon to the wii from D&P and raise them in a farm… this one sounds pretty cool and I will likely take a look at it when it launches. A new Dr. Mario… A new version of one of those popular Turbo Grafx Games (i can’t remember which). And a new Final Fantasy Chrystal Chronicles.
Now this last one was really quite a surprise. We knew since launch that Square was working on it, but we hadn’t really heard much from it since the launch came. Now we can assume the reason for this was because they didn’t want to talk too much about WiiWare until it was closer to being ready. They seem to be having two different types of WiiWare games. One is the traditional small puzzle game not unlike what is on most of X-Box Live… the other type is a full game (likely smaller) like FFCC. I think they announced the price of FFCC to be somewhere around 1600-1700 Wii Points (which is $16-17), which actually if it is a more full fledged game isn’t a bad price and may be the answer to those lesser games that I’ve been talking about for months being too expensive (like trauma center, cooking mama, and big brain academy). Perhaps a reason they are not releasing Brain Age yet on Wii is because it will be a WiiWare game instead later down the line for $20 instead of a disc for $50. I don’t know…
Now the real question remains is how much will the smaller games be? I could see pokemon go for maybe 1300 points, while a new Dr. Mario could go for 1200… I think for the smaller game these would be fairly acceptable prices, though I wouldn’t be surprised to see them go up to 1500 for bigger games. After all, I think the N64 & SNES games are a tad overpriced as it is… wouldn’t be at all surprising if they overprice the rest of their WiiWare games… but so far the news is good on WiiWare.
They also announced that their Everbody Votes channel will be updated in the future to allow you to rate games and then have the channel tell you similar games that you may be interested in. I have a feeling that this is an advertising ploy for WiiWare in particular, but I think it is still a good idea. One problem that is out there with something like X-Box Live is that many of the games you may not even look at because you don’t even KNOW if you would be interested in it, and this will help sift through the junk. I think it will also play big in helping with finding the right VC games as it is starting to get crowded in there and I think Nintendo is doing a good job at putting in off the beaten track games.
Speaking of the VC… they have recently been adding a lot of new types of games of late which really make me excited for the variety it’ll provide. Two weeks ago they added what I think is called the Super CD which I think was a CD add on for the Turbo GrafX. Last week they added an import section bringing over the long wanted Mario: Lost Levels and Sin & Punishment (Mario I am considering buying only for the fact that I feel it is a game lost from my youth). And this week they added in NeoGeo games (which was a system known for porting arcade games, so it has a lot of fighting games on it… it is a tad pricey but then I think the actual console was too). I am particularly interested in the imports… as I said I am considering Mario… but there are also a ton of games that never really made it over here such as the other Earthbound/Mother games, or Fire Emblem… Japan has had a history of really cool games that never made it over here because they were believed to be too “niche” to be worth the translation costs (I hope they actually translate these games though!!!!!). All these new systems and such make me wonder what they will launch next week but I bet this is it… still… am I the only one who thinks it would be pretty kick ass if they brought over 64DD games? There weren’t many games for it but, some of them were pretty cool in how they used the disk drive and since the Wii has the flash memory, this feature could easily be duplicated (after all there was only 64MB of space on those discs anyway).