Groovin' Blocks

Groovin' Blocks combines a match three game with a rhythm game in a very predictable way. The basic game clones Columns, which was Sega's answer to Tetris. Columns (and in more advanced levels, squares) of individually colored blocks fall into a pit one after another. If you arrange for three or more blocks of the same color to settle orthogonally, the blocks are cleared and potentially start a chain reaction as other blocks match three colors in a row. There's definitely skill involved, especially in pattern matching, but also a fair amount of luck in getting the right combination of colors and finding the biggest chain reactions.

While you can enjoy the basic game on it's own, you'll need to play the rhythm portion as well to rack up high scores earning stars to unlock new song sets and powerups. Dropping blocks on the right beat will start filling up a multiplier meter. Dropping on not on the right beat clears the meter and multiplier, but letting blocks settle on their own preserves any multiplier and progress. Powerups (such as bombs and scoring bonuses) are only primed if dropped on rhythm and later cleared. Finally there are "Super Beats", which temporarily double the multiplier if hit.

On the "Casual" level, I found the gameplay combination relaxing and interesting. Songs last about four minutes and tend to have plenty of beats, which makes for a pretty satisfying way to fill time once in a while. With playtime limited by the length of the song, it's fairly easy to get the satisfaction of beating each stage. The "Experienced" level ramps up the challenge by raising the score to earn stars introducing four-block squares and making the pieces fall faster. What tends to happen for me is either A) I focus on the match-three game and don't score enough points to earn stars or B) fail out of the song by dropping pieces before they are set to make combinations. In other words, when the game falls apart, it splits exactly on genre lines.

I can't help but be reminded of my initial experience with Tetris. On the surface, Tetris rewards neatly packed tetrominos and clearing lines as quickly as possible. But as you clear levels the pieces fall faster and faster until it's literally impossible to move pieces into place before they hit the stack. No matter how good you are, the game cannot be beaten. So you need to adjust to the goal of getting a high score, which rewards actions like hard-dropping pieces and clearing four lines at once (getting a "Tetris"). To me, building in such a way that deep pits form in order to drop an I tetromino appeared the antithesis of packing pieces properly. For years I gave up my Tetris addiction rather than change my play style. Playing the more advanced levels of Groovin' Blocks requires an equivalent paradigm shift. In this case, you must drop blocks more or less randomly on beat to build a multiplier and then capitalize on it by clearing blocks more or less methodically.

If you like 8-bit or electronica music, the set list is solid but short. After beating my head against particular songs, my enjoyment of the music started to drop off. Now that I've breezed through the lowest level, I'm stuck on the first set of songs in the middle level. Unlike most puzzle game that can be muted, in Groovin' Blocks you are competing against the music to pass a particular level. Turning off the sound deprives you of a key clue toward getting a high score. On the other hand, the visuals provide enough cues (rolling beat bar and pieces flash to the rhythm) that playing muted is (barely) possible. Also deserving mention (and commendation) are the calibration and colorblind options, which ought to be standard for rhythm games, but aren't.

I should point out that I was given the game code via the developer, Empty Clip Studios. There's very little chance I'd have bought it with my own money and I don't think I'd recommend anyone else paying for it unless they absolutely love the soundtrack (which can be sampled via Google). If you think you can handle hearing these tracks as many times as it takes to crack the scoring goals needed to move forward, then I'd recommend the game to you. (I should add that I did not try the multiplayer mode, but it seems unlikely to have potential to sway my opinion.)

Entertainment value: a short sudoku book with a chiptune soundtrack.

Least played Wii games

Kotaku has balanced their most-played list with a least-played list of Wii games. Sadly, I own two of the least-played 25:

13. Samba De Amigo - 4 hours, 16 minutes
 2. M&M's Kart Racing - 2 hours, 5 minutes

Low playtime on Samba de Amigo suggests that few people had the patience to learn the controls or that they just gave up based on (unfair) negative reviews. Oddly, I could not find any screenshots of people failing the game until I searched for the Dreamcast version. Perhaps the game was commonly bought or rented by people nostalgic for the original version who didn't really intend to spend serious time with it. Maybe it was brought out for parties and not touched otherwise. Whatever the case, this entry saddens me.

M&M's Kart Racing truly stinks up the Wii's library. My copy logged about 2 hours just so that I could verify that it was as awful as it seemed. I didn't want to review it unfairly. Unlike the rhythm game, this kart racer looks and sounds terrible. Clearly the bulk of the games development budget was spent on the box art, which seems to have paid off commercially if not critically. It was well-designed to be bought by a loved one as a hated gift.

And for the most part the rest of the list probably could be categorized with one or the other of these game: high presentation games that didn't play well and terrible games with great box art. These are a virtual rogue's gallery of bargain-bin denizens. While there are plenty of terrible games with terrible box art, they just were not successful enough to rack up 50,000 total hours of playtime. Even the worst of the worst that don't quite rate 2 hours per registered user would need to have been put into over 25,000 different Wii systems since their release. That's a pretty impressive number of unit sales.

Given my positive experience with Samba de Amigo, I'd be willing to try out a few of the less-iffy seeming games on this list:

25. Donkey Kong Barrel Blast - 5 hours, 1 minute
22. Cooking Mama World Kitchen - 4 hours, 41 minutes
21. Blast Works: Build Trade Destroy - 4 hours, 40 minutes
20. We Love Golf! - 4 hours, 39 minutes
17. Top Spin 3 - 4 hours, 35 minutes
11. Wild Earth: African Safari - 4 hours, 12 minutes

But only if:

24. The Price is Right - 5 hours

Wii Menu 4.3

My Wii's blue disk slot lit up the other day to let me know about Wii Menu 4.3. As usual, the update removes "unauthorized modifications to save data or program files". I don't actually use any homebrew software, so it should be fine to update, right?

Actually, no (or at least not yet).

In my day job, I manage a complex computer system that needs to work all the time. We have tons of systems which need to be regularly patched in order to protect against exploits, add features and correct bugs. Every patch must be evaluated by weighing the risks of implementing it against the risks of not implementing. Make no mistake, every patch carries a risk.

So the problem with this patch is that Nintendo didn't tell us what it actually does. The only place to begin to get a clue about what it contains is from Homebrew enthusiasts. Besides removing various bugs and homebrew files, the patch seems to a) enable USB camera code currently used by one game and b) do something with SDHC. So it basically offers me nothing. (And encouraged me to poke around the homebrew community, which I've mostly avoided in the past. Thanks Nintendo!)

How many games do you need?

Every now and then I read an article that compares the ratings of games on various consoles. Usually, the analysis is something like: "almost one in four Wii games in 2008 were utter, utter crap". Which sounds pretty bad until you remember Sturgeon's Revelation.

But there's a deeper problem with this analysis: most people are at least somewhat picky about the games they buy. For instance, if you look at the best-selling Wii games on Amazon. While there are a few game rated less than 4 stars (Wii Play, Wii Music, Super Paper Mario, etc.), none are rated below 3 stars. Most of the best selling games are also critical successes and loved by customers. The percentage of Wii titles that are shovelware doesn't matter as long as there are enough good games to keep you happy.

Which brings us to the question of how many games does a console need in order to be worth the initial cost of the system? First, let's assume that going to a movie is the standard for measuring the price people are willing to pay for an hour of entertainment. In 2009, the average movie ticket price in the US was $7.50. It's probably $10 or more in Southern California where I live, but let's just go with the national average. By general rule-of-thumb, the average movie length is 120 minutes, so the standard hourly rate for entertainment would be around $3.25 an hour (or $5+ in LA).

Now the Wii currently costs $199 and includes both Wii Sports and Wii Sports Resort, which is a pretty amazing deal. Divide the cost by the standard entertainment rate, and it works out to about 61 hours required to break even (or less than 40 where I live). According to the Nintendo Channel, Wii Sports averages just under 38 hours of play per console connected to WiFi. Wii Sports Resort averaged almost 19 hours by December, 2009. That means the current bundle is already likely to be worth the cost without considering any other games.

But let's say you don't think you'll play the Wii Sports games that much. Super Smash Bros. Brawl very nearly makes up the initial cost of the Wii all by itself (75+ hours). Don't forget that each game adds to the total cost of ownership, which means the extra $50 adds another 15 hours or so to the break-even-time. I'd also have to guess that a significant percentage of Smash Bros. game time is in multiplayer, so you need to add in the cost of extra controllers. (This applies to the Wii Sport titles as well, by the way.) On the other hand, each hour spent on a multiplayer game is worth one hour times the number of players. Compare taking a family of four to a movie ($30 or more) to spending an evening playing the Wii. You only need to make that choice half a dozen times to break even.

I can also tell you that between Wii Sports, Super Mario Galaxy and Lego Star Wars, our family has easily recouped the total cost of our Wii setup. So the answer to how many games you need is as few as one, if the game is good enough.

But to go back to the original complaint with the Wii library, one of the reasons's there are so many bad games is because it's relatively cheap to develop and publish a title for the low-powered, widely-owned system. That means publishers are far more willing to take risks and green light more projects. But the flip side is also true: consumers can take a risk and buy unknown or marginal titles since the standard price of Wii games is $10 (or about an entertainment hour) cheaper than PS3 and 360 games. What's more, it takes a lot more to recoup the cost of the more expensive consoles (and potentially more expensive TVs and sound systems to go with them). In fairness, we probably need to shift the baseline from a regular movie ticket to an IMAX ticket ($3-$5 extra).

Monster Hunter Tri (Demo)

Monster Hunter Tri is the third console iteration of an incredibly popular series from Japan. As far as I know, this is the first Monster Hunter to be actively marketed in the US, so a demo seems like a really good idea. Unfortunately, Capcom chose to distribute the demo disk through GameStop rather than directly or digitally. I walked into a local store a few weeks ago and spotted the display box filled with disks behind the counter. There were a couple of guys with name tags hanging out in the front of the store, but they professed ignorance of the game and demo. So I waited in line while the other two workers were selling the membership program to other customers. When I finally got to the front of the line, the pimply adolescent loudly announced his manager would only let him give out the disk to people who pre-ordered the game. That makes no sense since I wanted to get a demo in order to find out if I'd like to buy the game later. If I was ready to buy the game, why would I care about the demo? Like an idiot, I put down $5 to get the demo and then came back a few days later to cancel the pre-order. The strange thing is both times the clerk asked me to fill out a survey. I think he gets credit whether the feedback is good or bad.

Prior interest: Low

Until recently, I had a very vague idea of what Monster Hunter was all about: big in Japan, characters wield comically large weapons, "monsters" are a cross between dinosaurs and dragons, online is important for some reason and so on. Exactly why the Japanese pay for online services and sink hundreds of hours in the game isn't immediately clear from the description. Screen shots and gameplay videos reveal the graphics are exceptional, but the action seems very deliberate and the spaces somewhat limited. If ever there were a game that could benefit from a demo, this would be the one.

Odds of purchase: Medium

Besides the disk, the demo came with a huge, color instruction sheet for all the different weapon controls. For instance, if you pick the lance, the Z button initiates a charge, but it charges up a whirlwind maneuver if you are using the giant hammer. While you are certainly free to jump right in and learn the controls by trying them out, examining the control sheet is highly recommended. Only the Wiimote and Nunchuck controls are listed, so if you want to play the demo with a Classic Controller you need to look around online or make good guesses.

During the loading screens, Capcom warns that there might be differences between the demo and the final game. Other than slight wording changes, I can't imagine what they would change since the game has been out in Japan for half a year. That means it's hopeless to dream the final version will include GameCube controller support. The demo consists of two quests: the one star Great Jaggi and a three star Qurupeco. Both are limited to 20 minutes, so there's some pressure to get right to work attacking the quest monster. As I'll mention in a minute, it's worth your time to explore the Deserted (or Solitary) Island, where both quests are located.

In contrast to the limited choice of quests, the demo opens up all the weapon types and even offers multiple versions of some. There's also a wide variety of armor choices and both genders. The costumes seem mostly, well, cosmetic, but the different weapon choices force different approaches to battle. Sword and shield allow quicker attacks at the cost of damage per attack. The three classes of bowguns trade slower developing attacks for high potential damage. Trying out all the possibilities turns out to be a major draw of the demo.

After you've made your choices and waited through a stylish loading screen, you are dumped into a hunting camp on the island with no clear clue what's going on. There is an area map with the quest monster clearly marked. So the natural thing to do is to navigate to where it's prowling around. On the way, you'll encounter some more loading screens and a dynamic environment. There are mushrooms, herbs, grazing herbivores, smaller carnivores and odd, tool-using cats. While you can interact with these elements, there's no point to it in the context of the demo as everything goes away after 20 minutes.

When you finally do confront the quest monster, you'll probably find yourself unceremoniously dumped back at camp if you try charging in and hacking away. For one thing, attacks are slow and difficult to aim. For another, monster attacks cause significant damage and are often chained. So if you get knocked down, you'll barely have time to get up before getting assaulted again. You are equipped with plenty of health potions, but you better learn to put away your weapon and use the sprint button to get far away from predators or you'll loose as much health as you gain. Once you learn to read a beasts pattern and develop an appropriate counterattack (involving plenty of evasive maneuver), you'll have an easier time taking them down.

With some luck and practice, you will start dealing out enough damage to see your prey change behavior. There's no status bar, so you just have to observe the monster to know when you are getting close to a kill. The first time I saw the Great Jaggi limp out of the area, I got a sudden adrenaline rush and sprinted after him only to be slaughtered a few minutes later because of over-aggression. It took several more tries to master the patience needed for delivering solid blows without receiving any. When I did complete the first quest (with switch-ax), the exhilaration I felt matched the time I'd spent.

So the demo provides a taste test of the meat of Monster Hunter Tri: hunting monsters. If you look hard enough and ignore the quest, you'll also find a limited sampling of the game's side dishes. For instance, you can kill some cow-like Aptonoth, carve them for their meat, roast it on your BBQ spit, and eat the cooked meat for added stamina. But there isn't much point to doing it since your hunter is already equipped with well-done steaks at the start of the quest. There's a distant sea cave you can swim to that features giant mosquitoes called Bnahabra and a pile of bones to dig through. Clearly the place means something, but with no in-game help, who knows what these things are called or why they exist. Apparently, the full game features a story mode that serves as a sort of tutorial for the game, but the demo dumps you right into the action. And of course, the demo leaves out all online features.

So as a demo, it gets the essentials right: give the prospective customer a taste of the game so they can get excited about it. Unfortunately, the demo focus on a portion of the game that's an acquired taste and leaves out the bits that are likely to be appealing to a broad audience. Fortunately, the rest of Capcom's marketing effort is directed at filling in the gaps. But next time, why not make the demo a free download? Just a thought.

Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga

Lego Star Wars was the game that prompted me to buy a Wii. I even bought the game before I bought the console.¹

The first video game I played was a home version of Pong. I don't remember much about it, but I do recall waiting for the TV to warm up so we could play a few games of Pong before Dukes of Hazard or some such came on. It's a simple game and after a few plays you are ready for something else. One of my friends had an Atari 2600 that got a lot more play from us since it had Breakout, Combat, Indy 500, and especially Space Invaders. I vividly remember spending entire afternoons trying out the various game modes of Space Invaders—the 2600 version had 112 including invisible enemies and moving shields.

Then a series of events pulled me away from home consoles for many years. We moved away, my parents got rid of our old TV and bought a Tandy 1000 SX home computer. So I missed out on the NES, the 16-bit consoles, the PlayStations, and the various other gaming systems that connect to a TV screen. Instead I played tons of PC games from Sopwith to IL-2 Sturmovik. As you might imagine, I also spent tons of time and money upgrading my computer so that I could play the latest PC games. It was sometime after I got married and before our son was born that I got burnt out and gave up on upgrading my PC. A few years later I picked up a Jakks Atari TV game out of nostalgia, but I figured I'd outgrown video games.

Time for a short history of video games digression. Video games exist in three distinct zones. The first is arcade games which reside in public locations such as bars, pizza parlors, movie theaters and, of course arcades. Second is home consoles, which are attached to family TVs in the living room or den. Lastly are computer games that played in the home office or den. As a result of these zones, each type of game has developed it's own distinct traits. Arcade games are bright, inviting, technically advanced, fast-paced, public, and unforgiving because they are designed to eat quarters. On the other end of the spectrum, computer games tend to be darker, complex, technically limited, contemplative, individual, and deep since they reside on the same machine that is used for word processing and spreadsheets. Home consoles sit between the extremes.

Initially, consoles were just cheaper versions of arcade machines that could be experienced in homes. But somewhere around the end of the Atari era and the beginning of the NES era, consoles began to assert a separate style of gameplay that was a little more relaxed than their arcade cousins. Donkey Kong did its best to kill you off in the first minute or two, but Super Mario Bros. gives you a lot more rope to keep playing. Console games could afford to offer a deeper experience without the pressure to cycle through players as there is at the arcade. On the other hand, they were restrained from becoming as complex as PC games since they relied on a public resource (the living room TV). Over time, console games drifted closer to the PC style as more gaming systems were attached to TVs in bedrooms and game rooms. By the time I started looking into consoles again, they were a far cry from the Atari I grew up with.

A few Christmases ago I visited my brother who has an Xbox 360 and a copy of Lego Star Wars, which he fired up between events. It looked fun so I asked to play and he handed me a second controller and I dropped in. We worked together for a while solving puzzles and beating up battle droids. Then he needed to go do something and dropped out for a while. As we played through the story, other family members (including non-gamers) sat around to watch the goofy cut scenes between levels. Gameplay is so accessible almost anyone can start playing (and make progress) moments after picking up the controller. In essence, the game was a lot like the family, living-room, arcade-style games from the Atari and NES eras.

When I first heard the concept of the game, I couldn't get my head around it. How do you make a game based on both Lego toys and Star Wars? I assumed there would be lots of building with bricks and that didn't seem to fit with the action-oriented movies. And the developers seem to agree since game uses Lego environments mostly for the sake of destruction. Pretty much everything that looks like it's built out of Legos can be destroyed. Besides being fun to smash up the environment, the game scatters studs (Lego currency) everywhere to be collected for buying bonus features and characters later. Building is included for solving puzzles, but it's somewhat abstract as you'll find a pile of bricks, hold a button and your character starts to assemble some useful object. (Often you can turn around and destroy it again, which is therapeutic.)

As for the movies, I've seen the original trilogy dozens of times and, as good as it is, I've gotten a little numb to the story. As for the prequels, they seem to take themselves too seriously and I actually fell asleep during the most recent one. Lego Star Wars manages to fix both issues at the same time. All the dialog-y bits are presented in pantomime cut-scenes that usually feature some sort of twist. For instance, the dramatic credit scene from Empire gets a gag where Luke's robotic hand jumps off his body and wanders around Thing-like. Then you get to play through all the action scenes which are greatly expanded from the movies. The game manages to capture the feel of the movie action sequence such as firing blasters at Stormtroopers while a droid works to open a blast door. Maybe not groundbreaking, but it feels just right.

After you finish a level in Story Mode, you unlock the option to play again in Free Play mode. In addition to using different characters, you can also find all sorts of hidden objects the second time around since different character classes are required to open up certain areas. There's just so much content and attention to detail it's hard to take it all in. Even in the overworld (Mos Eisley Cantina) you can easily amuse yourself getting into brawls, breaking up furniture, solving mini puzzles, and so on. By the way, get the Complete Saga version that includes levels from the first two games plus a few little extras.

By nature these games are cooperative. If you play alone, the computer takes over the other character, but it's not as fun. Either the computer will basically solve puzzles for you or will refuse to do their part causing you to switch from one character to another in a frantic attempt to do everything. After you've seen how to get through a section, it doesn't hurt to replay it on your own, but don't start off that way. Two player mode has it's own problems. Since there's only one camera, players can't wander where they please. It's not uncommon for one person to press ahead while the other wants to hang around and find secrets. Until one or the other caves in, this results in a frustrating fight for control of the camera that leaves both players stuck at the edge of the screen.

The other serious issue comes from the platforming elements. I don't know what it is about 3D platforming, but it's hard to judge jumps and the camera loves to move at the exact moment you need to pick a direction. Lego Star Wars exacerbates the problems by making the edges of the platforms mushy so you tend to slip to your doom when you get too close to a bottomless pit. If that weren't bad enough, you always respawn in the exact same spot and if you don't take action right away you'll fall in again and again. A stupid trick to play with a "friend" is to push them over a cliff and not move so they fall over and over. The computer loves to do that. (For an example of how to do this the right way, look at New Super Mario Bros. Wii.) Thankfully, death doesn't cost anything but studs, but this is a completely avoidable problem.

Another problem, especially for younger/less-experienced gamers, comes from the complex and layered nature of the levels. Often there will be a little hint that something is hidden behind a wall or a puzzle to be solved, but these are sometimes premature in Story Mode—they require characters that are unavailable. Even for me, it was sometimes hard to figure out what needed to be done to get through some levels. Particularly frustrating are the vehicle levels which seem to go on and on without giving any indication of how to proceed. In addition, they are the least cooperative sections of the game and even encourage competition.

And cooperation really makes this game special. It's a game that my son asks to play with me and then I get to be his hero by fighting off the bad guys and he gets to be the hero by finding the key to some puzzle or the direction to take next. And then my wife comes along and we switch to Wii bowling for a while.

Entertainment value: All 6 Star Wars DVDs edited by Steven Spielberg and a pile of Star Wars Lego sets.

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1 - The reason I bought it before a Wii was that I wanted to get a copy of "The Complete Saga" for my brother who only had Episodes I-III. Unfortunately, I didn't know that XBox game boxes are green and Wii boxes are white. So I returned the game and bought it again about a year later.

Facts over flash

So I realize the recent IGN Editorial: Blinded by Mario is designed to get attention. Mission accomplished, I guess. But it's a textbook example of making an argument with flash, calling it opinion, and obscuring the evidence that contradicts an author's conclusion. Let's take a look at the facts.

The subtitle of the article is "'Splosion Man vs. New Super Mario Bros. Wii: which is really the better platformer?" Unfortunately, it isn't practical to evaluate these games firsthand. The first is available only on XBox Live Arcade and the second is only available on the Wii. Since I only own the Wii platformer, I'm somewhat biased toward Mario's game. But there are objective measurements of each game's quality. At this moment, Metacritic lists New Super Mario Bros. Wii at 87 with a User Score of 9.1. Splosion Man boasts the same User Score and has a very good Metascore of 84. Looking at Game Rankings produces similar numbers (88.50% vs. 85.74%). The wisdom of the crowds suggests Mario has a slightly better game.

Other games mentioned in the editorial also earned high Metascores. For the sake of comparison, here are the top platformers released in 2009 according to Metacritic:

Game                                       Metascore
----                                       ---------
Braid (PS3)                                94
Braid (PC)                                 90
Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack in Time  87
New Super Mario Bros. Wii                  87
LittleBigPlanet (PSP)                      87
PixelJunk Eden Encore                      86
LostWinds: Winter of the Melodias          86
Splosion Man                               84
Trine                                      83
NyxQuest: Kindred Spirits                  82
Patapon 2                                  81

Braid was originally released on XBox360 in 2008, so it really should be out of consideration for 2009. Splosion Man does not show up in the Metacritic search as it's listed as "Action, Adventure". In any case, Splosion Man does not stand out in any particular way.

Now there are problems with simple review scores. These are vastly different games. One could argue NSMBW gets an unfair advantage since it's a MARIO game. Actually reading some reviews shows that being a Mario game has hurt it's review scores. It would be interesting to see what would happen if the game could be reskinned as a new set of characters in a new world. (How about Jumpman Rescue Team?) Meanwhile, Splosion Man clearly earns extra credit for it's a) lower price, b) independant developer, c) original character, d) platform (which is fairly light on platformers), and e) edgier content. Of these, price is the only variable a Mario title can really change.

So let's talk price. Like any consumer product, software must follow the laws of supply and demand—higher demand and lower supply result in higher prices. But unlike most goods, software supply is virtually infinite. Therefor software companies, such as Nintendo, artificially control supply by setting prices. All other variable the same, lower priced games sell better than higher priced games. Since the goal of game developers is to maximize profits, games tend to be priced as high as possible without killing demand. When demand starts falling, game prices start falling as well. Since New Super Mario Bros. Wii is the best selling title that doesn't have "Modern Warfare" in it's title, it's fair to say the price is right for consumers. No matter what any particular consumer feels, those are the facts.

While we are at it, comparing the price of a retail game to a downloadable game is staggeringly naïve. For one thing, manufacturing and packaging cost an extra $3 or so. Distribution costs are substantially higher for physical media and may be more than the full price on an online game. From the perspective of consumer value, physical disks add real value that may be transfered either through the used market or simply by being available for loan to friends and family. On Amazon, you can sell your copy of New Super Mario Bros. Wii for about $30. In addition, retail games may be rented for less than the price of an online game. Since downloadable games are priced much lower, they may be a good value if you intend to keep and play the game for the life of your console. Otherwise, you may be better off with the traditional distribution model. In either case, price tags can not be compared directly.

One advantage of disk-based games is they have far more room for graphical and auditory content. From screen shots, Splosion Man seems take place in a single environment:

New Super Mario Bros. Wii does not feature shifting perspective, but does contain many more environments:

Now we can look at the three "Exhibits" the editorial lists:

Exhibit A: 'Splosion Man is more original

Certainly Splosion Man is a new and very original character compared to Mario who has been jumping around for 28 years. However, originality does not equate with quality. If anything, the Mario brand has become a reliable indicator of quality that few other franchises can match. He has certainly not followed the path of Sonic in this game. How many games does Splosion Man have in him before his act gets old? And while we are on the subject, doesn't Splosion Man remind you of someone else:

Exhibit B: 'Splosion Man does four-player online co-op

While this is certainly true and I haven't actually played Splosion Man, multiplayer in New Super Mario Bros. Wii seems a different beast altogether. For one thing, each of the levels may be played solo, cooperatively or competitively using one of two scoring systems. Levels in Splosion Man are divided between solo and co-op levels. From what I've seen and read, all players of the XBox game need to be experienced in order to make it through the co-op levels. Common to many Wii games, unequal players can have fun playing as Mario, Luigi and the Toads. Certainly "Exhibit B" is a point in favor of the newcomer, but only if you care about playing online and don't care to play with non-gamers.

Exhibit C: 'Splosion Man offers more content for a fraction of the price

We've already dealt with the price to an extent, but I find the statistics very misleading. For one thing, all 77 levels in the Mushroom Kingdom are playable by 1 to 4 players. I've played through Level 1-1 dozens of times both alone and with others and I'm only now losing interest in it, even when I'm watching others play. Later levels are even more clever, challenging and entertaining. Only half of the levels in the Big Science Labs are playable single player and the other half are strictly multiplayer. No doubt it's exciting to speed run the levels, but I'm pretty sick of watching Splosion Man wall jump. Honestly, I have a very hard time imagining Splosion Man offering significantly more content than New Super Mario Bros. Wii. Level counts only work if the levels have more or less equal depth.

The dig at the Wii's technical ability is totally gratuitous. Hopefully I don't need to explain why that bit of flambait ought to be ignored.

I can see where journalists come from when they declare Nintendo lazy or cheap. Many of the features nearest and dearest to them have been left out of the most popular Wii titles. Features that mean nothing to them have been substituted. It's a bitter truth, but Nintendo no longer needs to cater to the HARDCORE in order to sell games. For better of worse, these gamers have outgrown Nintendo after all these years. If you are listening: please don't try to rob the joy the rest of us are experiencing from the current lineup of Wii games.