There's been building exciting about Nintendo's WiiWare platform, particularly after its Japanese launch. There have been some promising looking previews, some outlandish title announcements, and some less-than-fulfilling DLC details. But what really concerns me about WiiWare, what will make the break the service for me, is the longjevity of the content it sells.

Big whoop, right? They're only $5 and $10 games, right? I shouldn't be expecting so much out of content with such tight tight size restrictions, right? Well I find it hard to disagree with any of those objections. And if it wasn't for the fact that original games have already been offered on the other two platforms, I'd say you're right. But unlike the great online debate where XBL gives you a superior service for a fee and PSN & Wii give you something for nothing, this debate is an open & shut case since there is one uniform similarity between downloadable games on all platforms: Price.

The $10 I spend on a WiiWare game are the same $10 I spend on a PSN game. And it's just hard for me to consider spending money on an updated flash game where my mouse is replaced by a remote pointer. This isn't the majority of the WiiWare titles, so let's consider the incredibly promising looking ones. Lost Winds looks particularly interesting imo, as does Square Enix's rip-off Final Fantasy RTS ($15 for the game, and up to an additional $15 for all of the dlc). But outside of these titles, very few catch my attention. There's the Super R Type, which IGN has detailed as extremely disappointing due to its lack of a 1 player campaign. It seems that the game only has a time attack mode (?). Then there's the zany competitive eating game, the game with stick figure people, and a couple of other titles that have me wondering exactly what the standard for these games is going to be. I downloaded PixelJunk Monsters off of the PSN store for $10 and have enjoyed the game for 50+ hours. And I'm still not done. That kind of playability for a $10 is the kind of value I'm looking for from WiiWare. There seem to be mostly short, quirky thrills headed to the service, and it's got me wondering whether everybody's looking forward to WiiWare because it's showing some promise, or simply because we're happy Nintendo has an original dlc service.