Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Viva la Wiivolution!

In case you missed it, the gaming blogosphere just exploded in a giant orgasm of Nintendo love.

Everybody was embargoed until the start of the nintendo conference, but the NY Times leaked it a couple hours before, and then there was a stampede of typing fingers and a rush of uploading bits and now you can find coverage here, here, here, here, and, well, name your games site.

Bottom line: Nov 19, $250, bundled with "Wii Sports" a collection of gesticu-tastic sports mini-games. (so I wasn't too far off on yesterday's prediction :-). There's an online service of retro titles, priced $5-$10. On the plus side, Nintendo retro-action is da bomb. On the down side, no goal (stated at this time anyway) to go after indie titles, something we are doing with Arcade (same goes for traditional casual titles).

I tip my hat to Nintendo. The have used 'content + low ASP' strategy several times now (gameboy vs gamegear, N64 vs other consoles of that era, gamecube vs xbox and ps2, DS vs PSP), each time successfully, and each time to the embarassment of those that declared them dead in the water.

This will be good competition for 360. "No more shooting fish in a barrel" as an old boss of mine used to say.

As for Sony, well, wow. They'd better have some dang impressive games to come in at 2.4x the price and have Mario, Luigi, Zelda and Donkey Kong all kicking you in the shins.

Well played, Nintendo! Rock on.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Don't you mean "Wiiva la Wiivolution"?