Nintendo consoles have never been known for their massive amount of third-party exclusives, instead you probably know the main reason to buy one of their systems is for all franchises Nintendo has created throughout the years. Still, due the huge quantity of complaints regarding third-party support on every single one of Nintendo's systems after the Super Nintendo fans are always expecting the company to address this situation with aggressive strategies to attract third-party companies and keep them by their side.

Alluring third-parties is the easiest part, the Nintendo Wii has an enormous install base and every single sales chart brings positive news for Nintendo and its partners. However the tough part is convincing them there is a big audience of Wii owners out there that simply doesn't care about generic mini-game collections, party games or any other kind of poorly produced casual games, a task that becomes harder to accomplish with every passing month where sales data show Little King's Story struggling to break into the Top 10 while EA's newest fitness game sells two times more than Michael Jackson's albums after his death.

Miraculously, though, if you look hard enough you can still find a few companies - Nintendo aside - that are brave enough to take the task of producing games the hardcore crowd wants. Investments like those usually generate great Wii exclusive games such as the aforementioned Little King's Story, Boom Blox, Zack and Wiki, MadWorld, De Blob, Muramasa The Demon Blade, Rune Factory, No More Heroes, The Conduit and many others.

This generation Nintendo failed in attracting major third-party non-exclusive franchises like Resident Evil and Street Fighter, more due to its system's limitations than to ineffective negotiations. The recent news that No More Heroes and other games may be brought to the Playstation 3 and the Xbox 360 in the future, while Chinatown Wars is heading to the PSP reveals Nintendo's real problem in their relation with third-party companies, money.

While we watched Microsoft and Sony battle to steal exclusives from each other in the past few years Nintendo always seems to be away from those extremely competitive auctions. If there is one thing that third-parties like more than producing a game for a high selling system is to receive loads of money from a hardware manufacturer to guarantee exclusivity over their product. Nintendo seems to make little to no effort in keeping, or paying for exclusives to be developed for their system.

It is hard to tell exactly why this happens, but one of the factors Nintendo may refuse to pay third-parties for their support is because they know their core audience will buy their systems no matter what because regardless of the generation you are talking about there will always be only one system where you will be able to play Zelda, Mario, Metroid, F-Zero, Star Fox, Punch-Out, Pilotwings, Smash Bros, Mario Party, Wario Ware, Paper Mario and others.

Good third-party games, for the biggest part of Nintendo's audience, are just pastimes while they wait for the Big N to drop their huge games. Nintendo may be overconfident in this aspect, and with a certain degree of reason after all they are leading the market, but it would certainly be nice if their platforms received and kept huge third-party exclusives.

Finally I had time and patience to write my Punch-Out Wii review, recommend it if you like it. If you don't care about the game or you are too lazy to read through that many paragraphs just ignore this post. By the way, no I didn't have much creativity when thinking about the review's title.

A wild Wall of Text appears! Fight, use your Pokeballs or just run!

Little Mac returns, and he is better than ever

Out of all old-school Nintendo franchises that had been on a limbo for the past two decades Punch-Out was not among those that were likely to make a glorious come back. While the game's first two versions were packed with fun and challenge, the latter being a feature young gamers have yet to meet, its mechanics were extremely simple, maybe too simple to warrant a full-fledged sequel on a modern scenario where most games need to have huge scopes to be successful. However all rules have their exceptions, and fortunately Nintendo was brave enough to believe Punch-Out could once again achieve greatness, and passed this responsibility to Next Level Game.

The new Punch-Out can easily be described as a new coat of paint over an old title since not much has changed, but making such a statement is shallow because one would be ignoring all the little things that have been added to improve the experience. The basics are still the same, press button 1 for a left hook, button 2 for a right hook, and combine them with the D-pad up to land jabs. When avoiding your enemy's attacks you can either dodge to the sides, duck or try to block (a not so smart decision against the more powerful boxers).

But since we are talking about a Wii game, the developers obviously didn't forget about the Wiimote and Nunchuck, giving players another option on how to play the game. This control scheme allows you to make movements with both controls to land punches, while the rest of the actions remain button-specific. While the controls are extremely compelling and intuitive chances are by the time you get to the last boxers you will have switched to the traditional controls, not only because they are slightly more responsive but also because the novelty of actually punching your enemy may wear out for some.

Simple controls are joined by simple mechanics. Each boxer in the game - there is a total of thirteen plus a secret character - will follow a certain pattern of punches, taunts and fakes all you need to do is memorize those, punch at the right time and within a few rounds victory will be yours. It is easier said than done though for as you advance through the game patterns will get more complicated, punches will come faster, tells will become harder to identify and the damage taken from the blows doubles.

As usual Punch-Out is a game built on funny stereotypes and the cast of boxers you will face while going for the World Title is fantastic. Starting with the fragile Frenchman, going through the drunk Russian, Spanish Don Juan and ending with the powerful champion. Discovering each and every stereotype and reference to the culture of the country becomes a game within the game itself and adds a lot to the title. Within a few hours of gameplay it is easy to create a connection and develop a relationship with the very likable over-the-top characters.

This entertaining cast of boxers will be faced on a few different modes presented by the game. Career Mode shows Little Mac - the game's protagonist - in his bid for the title, starting from the Minor Circuit, rising to the Major Circuit and eventually facing the world's top boxers on World Circuit. Beating thirteen boxers to reach the title may make you think Punch-Out is not a very long title, but when you take into account the hours one may spend to beat the toughest boxers you absolutely have a lengthy package in your hands.

In order to give more soul and even more character to the already fabulous cast the game features some incredible cutscenes that show Little Mac training with his coach Doc Louis, therefore adding a little value to the game's story. Unfortunately, for some reason the developers decided not to insert cutscenes while presenting the opponent. Instead we get a slideshow of funny images showing either the preparation or the personality of the fighter. Presenting those slideshows in the form of cutscenes would have definitely added a lot of value to the game's already astonishing presentation. But the lack of animations going into the fight is compensated by the overly funny dialogue and animations that happen in battle.

As if spending long hours to become the champ wasn't enough Little Mac's career is far from its end when he grabs the title. Title Defense Mode will put you against all of the thirteen boxers once again, however this time around they have new more complicated patterns, stronger attacks and even new ways to defend themselves. If you think the last battle of Career Mode is hard just wait until you see how insanely the weakest of the fighters becomes in Title Defense Mode. If you have been missing a real challenge while playing games Punch-Out will fulfill all your needs in a fantastic way.

Exhibition mode allows you to play any boxers that you have previously defeated with a new twist, each fighter will have three challenges to be completed - both on Career Mode and Title Defense. The challenges have an incredible variety from beating a character within three punches or winning the fight without being punched, while they may sound hard at first - and they actually are - as long as you keep on trying and working hard on the patterns all of them will seem pretty achievable within a certain time.

Aside from the wonderful cutscenes and beautiful modern presentation Punch-Out still has a few surprises on its sleeve when it comes to visuals. The cell-shaded look of the game is astonishing as its art joined by its incredibly natural character animations automatically make it one of the best looking games on the system. The overwhelming graphics and the great soundtrack which features exclusive catchy tunes for each one of the fighters just go to show how careful the developers were in bringing this franchise back to life. The sound effects are also precise and real.

The game also features a very detailed Voice Acting work, with most of the boxers being from non-English speaking countries the team behind the game was careful enough to make the characters actually speak the language, not some nonsense sequence of words that sound like a language. People who know the idioms will be pleased to see that and people who don't will constantly be curious about what the opponent may be saying to tease Little Mac.

Overall Punch-Out is a very impressive package and it easily ranks among the Wii's finest games. With great presentation, a good variety of controls, a funny cast of boxers, huge replay value, over thirty hours of gameplay and a lot of challenge it is a must buy for anyone that loves simple yet addicting titles or is just curious to see Nintendo's unique take on the boxing genre.

Actual Score: 9.2

You already know the drill. Buy a new Mario game, pop it into your system and within a few minutes Bowser will find another ridiculously over-the-top way to kidnap Princess Peach such using airships to lift her castle into outer space, using a piece of cake attached to a teddy bear in order to lure her into a trap or simply walk into a heavily guarded castle and stroll out of it carrying her on his strong arms. A few seconds after such a dramatic and unexpected turn of events Mario will hop out of his comfortable bed and be thrown into another platform-jumping adventure.

There is no tension in it, and there is certainly no exciting drama to be seen as the most reused storyline of all time is shown on screen once again wearing a fresh coat of paint. Still Mario games are the ultimate proof that, differently from fantastic gameplay, an impressive storyline is far from being one of the necessary aspects to build a great game. Of course there is a group of genres that need a deep obscure and rather complicated plot to keep you going, but platformers are not a part of this group.

Even though Mario games have been consistently good (I like to think of Mario is Missing and Mario's Time Machine never existed) while not presenting any deep web of relationships between its characters there are still gamers who rant about Nintendo every time Peach gets kidnapped and some of those comments came up once again as Miyamoto stated that Super Mario Galaxy 2 would have even less of a plot than its predecessor had.

After reading such a statement I was jumping with joy meanwhile angry people made a big deal about the fact Mario will probably be running after Bowser once again with no previous explanation as to why the Mushroom Kingdom's royal family reached such a tough political situation in its relation with the Koopa King and his cohorts.

There is just no way a Mario platformer could benefit from a carefully crafted storyline - maybe that statement will be proved wrong one day - he is a plumber who acts as a superhero on his spare time or when local damsels get kidnapped by an evil lord of evil who looks like a turtle or a monkey who wears a tie. In order to do so he needs to gather shiny stars or reach the end of a level while climbing on a massive flag. In a nutshell, Mario doesn't make any sense and if someone is somehow able to craft a serious plot without sounding terribly cheesy and with no terrible dialogue or voice acting that person should be awarded an Oscar.

Aside from the uncomfortable cheesy situations that would be created if Nintendo actually tried to add some spice to Mario's storylines we would have to deal with constant three-minute cutscenes to break the pace of our star-collecting adventures, and when it comes to Mario games any five-second load time seems like a whole hour because you just can't wait to go back to that level to squash some Goombas once again. Now just imagine how long a two-minute dramatic dialogue between Mario and Peach would last, better than that just fully ignore such a thought.

One of the main laws of the circle of life is that Peach must be kidnapped otherwise I fear what would possibly happen to the world or to our patience while going through dialogues or cutscenes. Therefore the next time Bowser kidnaps Peach just celebrate, make a toast to all damsels in distress, or just smile at Nintendo's ability to give a new look to a situation that is older than time itself, and just hope Bowser finishes his job as fast as possible so you can quickly jump into the action and collect some nonsense stars spread around awesomely nonsense worlds.