Picture by Craig Wilson

The Nintendo Wii stands astride the gaming world, a miniature colossus. Two years ago we were still making hilarious jokes about urination: now with 35 million consoles sold worldwide it's Nintendo who are laughing, their executives swimming around in vaults of money like Scrooge McDuck and developing games devoted to water sports with no sense of irony.

Like its little brother the Nintendo DS, Wii has changed the rules of the game forever. Its simplified motion-sensing fun is ubiquitous in modern society; Wiis are as commonplace in your local watering hole as a Bullseye quiz machine. Perhaps the most important test for any technology is the 'granny test'. Mine could pick up a remote and, varicose veins aside, have a decent game of Wii Sports. Give her an Xbox with a copy of Gears of War and the results would be predictably disastrous.

At the Wii's launch in 2006, Microsoft and Sony laughed off any notion of competition with the Wii for market dominance. In fact, Microsoft invited consumers to buy a Wii to complement their Xbox 360. When the Wii overtook Xbox sales worldwide within a year of release despite Microsoft's head start, you have to wonder what advice the Big M would have given with the benefit of hindsight.

Despite the Wii attracting folk who would normally avoid computer games like the plague, it has failed to resonate with one group: 'hardcore gamers'. They are the ones fretting over high scores and online competition, avoiding socialising and sunlight at all costs. While Nintendo were once the darling of the hardcore crowd with brilliant franchises like Mario and Zelda, their focus has now shifted onto titles like Cooking Guide, Brain Training and Wii Fit that can barely even be called computer games in the traditional sense. As a result, many old-school gamers have abandoned the Wii in favour of Xbox and Playstation- and with good reason.

Take a look at the Wii shelves next time you're in HMV or Zavvi. Riding the top of the charts are Carnival: Funfair Games, Wii Play and Big Beach Sports. What do these titles have in common? They are all simplistic, low budget and unequivocally awful. Game developers have split into two camps; one crapping out releases like Big Beach Sports while the other tone down Xbox and PS3 games, shoehorning their controls into a Wii format. With the notable exception of the brilliant Resident Evil 4, most traditional games on Wii suffer from poor controls that would be much more effective on an Xbox controller. It's as if developers just don't know what to do with all that waggle and feel the need to incorporate it in the most contrived way possible.

This view is echoed by Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aimé: "I will be able to say our licensees 'get it' when their very best content is on our platform. And with very few exceptions today, that's not the case." This is reflected in the fact that in-store prices of new games drop twice as fast on Wii compared to Xbox.  The problem is that games like Call of Duty appeal to a traditional gamer demographic and simply don't sell as well on Wii as on Xbox, although Fils-Aimé would be loathe to admit it. The real question is: when a game sells badly on Wii, is it because Wii owners aren't interested in traditional games, or is it due to the 'second cIass system' approach of third parties?

Aaron Greenberg, director of product management at Microsoft, argues that consumers view the Wii as a novelty that has more in common with a karaoke machine than an entertainment hub. "Those customers are eventually going to want to graduate to an Xbox 360 experience," claims Greenberg. But in light of Microsoft's attempts to rope in the casual market with a new Xbox interface and games like SceneIt? and Lips (which, of course, turns your Xbox into a karaoke machine) they certainly seem reluctant to gamble on my granny taking up Gears. Rather than the Wii acting as a gateway to the gaming experiences of Xbox and Playstation, it continues to be differentiated. No matter how cool the Wii is in the eyes of the masses, other consoles remain the refuge of lonely nerds.

The reason why Nintendo no longer cater for the 'hardcore' market is obvious: they are a business and their goal is, believe it or not, to make lots of money. With the Wii and DS, Nintendo make a hell of a lot more money than they ever did with the Gamecube (or as I like to call it, "Barney's lunchbox". People often forget that Nintendo were originally founded as a playing-card company before diversifying into electronics. They don't feel any allegiances to their devoted and now disillusioned fan base, nor do they need to concentrate on a narrow demographic. If anything, the future will lead to even more titles like Wii Music that eschew challenge for the sake of inclusiveness.

What next for the Wii? Can it survive on a diet of brain and fitness trainers, or will gamers ultimately want more? The Wii is not a powerful piece of hardware and its games look, to be frank, bloody awful on a high-definition TV. Rumours of a 'Wii HD' have been around for a while, but you only have to look at the eye-burningly ugly Wii Sports to see that its players could care less about graphics.

Perhaps the novelty of Wii will eventually wear off and the mass 'graduation' Microsoft so desperately wish for will take place. Until then, I wish the Wii a happy 2nd birthday and look forward to the day when the software on offer matches the console's potential for truly incredible gaming experiences.

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This article was originally written for Student, issue dated 25/11/08.

Go to www.mygamercard.net and generate an NXE Avatar, then post the link or image in here! Hooray for avatars! They're lots of fun.

Bought Duke Nukem 3D tonight and picked up Table Tennis for a fiver. That's what I call a bargain!

Last week, I prepared a writing and reviewing guide for Tech to help some of our budding reviewers blossom into productive journalists. They seemed to find it very helpful, so I thought to myself: why not reproduce it here for the benefit of Gamespot readers and reviewers? Judging by some of the content I've read, you certainly need the help!

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Games are fun. While this might strike you as the most obvious comment in the world, the key thing in writing a technology piece is for this fun to come across in the article. You're aiming to write something that is engaging, entertaining and informative in equal measure.

Engaging

•    A strong opening can counteract any underlying crappiness (not that there will be any, of course). The use of questions or ideas that seem potentially outrageous are good ways to grab the reader's attention.
•    Never summarise the gist of your review in the first paragraph. You want the reader to read the whole review, not read something else after the opening sentence.
•    Remember your target audience: students. Not people who can tell their Core 2 Duo from an AMD Athlon, not people who know the exact speed of the Xbox 360's GPU… average students. For this reason you should avoid the use of florid technical language where at all possible.

Words you should not use in a Tech article: graphics, polygon, gameplay, replayability, lastability, graphics card, CPU, GPU, Havoc physics, Unreal Engine 3, bump-mapping, soft bloom shadowing etc. etc. etc. In particular 'gameplay' is a meaningless word, and 'next-generation consoles' is an anachronism since presumably you're playing one. Please use 'new generation' or 'current generation' if you must. Another choice phrase to avoid is "Words cannot describe…" or similar.

Entertaining

•    No-one wants to read a dry article and no-one wants to write one. Imagine you were having a conversation with someone about the game you're playing, or imagine you were giving a talk of the feature you want to write. Would you write the article differently? Sometimes I find people have difficulty translating their thoughts to print and thinking about your article in this way is quite a useful technique to overcoming it.
•    Tech is not the same as News. It is OK to write more informally as long as you avoid use of exclamation marks (!).
•    Humour: you've either got it or you haven't. If you haven't got it, don't use it. If you have it, don't abuse it. I love puns as much as the next person but not everyone appreciates it.
•    Until I have the time and resources to start the Alan Williamson Similes and Metaphors Workshop™, a rough guide is: instead of using clichés and tired phrases, mix it up a bit. For example: "As common as muck" becomes "As common as obnoxious mobile phone ringtones on a school bus". This is a poor example but it's the best I can come up with at the moment!
 
Informative

•    Remember the overall goal of the article is to inform the reader about a purchase (normally). After reading your review the reader should be more informed about whether or not to buy the product.
•    This means there's no sense writing a game review from the perspective of a hardcore fan of the series or genre- they will have already bought it. Likewise if you don't like sports games, don't review them.
•    It is important to strike a balance between entertaining and informing the reader. If you put in too many jokes, you're using valuable space informative content would normally fill. Following on from that…
•    Humour is best when it achieves something. It can draw attention to flaws in a comical way or highlight farcical logical fallacies. Humour without a point can quickly deteriorate into impotent wisecracking.

StyIe  and Grammar
•    Please refrain from using an oxford comma before any use of 'and'.
•    Flow is all-important. You do not and should not feel the need to write about every aspect of the game. We don't need an obligatory paragraph about the graphics if they aren't worth writing about, nor do we need to mention a non-existent story. It should not be possible to divide your review into sections for each aspect of a game. Each section should lead into another.
•    Under no circumstances should your review be broken down into sections e.g. 'Graphics', 'Story', 'Gameplay' etc. etc. If you don't have the intelligence to lay out a review as continuous prose, you don't have the intelligence to write a review.
•    Be careful about the use of semi-colons and colons; check Wikipedia if you're unsure which is the correct usage.
•    Emphasis, if required, should be italicised and used sparingly (ideally never).
•    A final point is to ward off what I lovingly refer to as "thesaurus rape". I appreciate we all have access to a thesaurus in the Internet age, but that doesn't mean you have to be supercilious when mere arrogance will suffice    

To sum up this rambling document in a sentence:

Keep your articles informative, remember your target audience and entertain them!
Happy writing!