Games Wii Forgot: Disaster Day Of Crisis

DISASTER: DAY OF CRISIS
Developer: Monolith Soft
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: September 2008
Sales: Under 100k (Europe and Japan only)

With E3 and the reveal of Project Café less than a week away, the Games Wii Forgot feature comes to an end. Over the past five weeks, I've tried to not only select the best Wii games that got sadly overlooked by players, but also ones which exemplified certain aspects of what made the console so special. Deadly Creatures, the niche but innovative and thoroughly distinctive third-party curio. The Godfather: Blackhand Edition, which proved that motion controls could work brilliantly within the context of traditional genres. Little King's Story, the deceptively complex game wrapped in cutesy colours. Sin & Punishment: Successor Of The Skies, one of this generation's purest 'hardcore' gaming experiences enhanced by the Wii remote.

The final game in the list was saved for last not only because its sales were so catastrophically low - barely registering in the two territories where it saw release - but because it encapsulates so much of the joy and frustration of being a Nintendo gamer this generation. Disaster: Day of Crisis was one of the games used by Nintendo at an E3 demonstration to show off what the Wii could do, but subsequently disappeared, along with another game called Project HAMMER. While that game was cancelled, Disaster struggled on and eventually scraped into a tiny number of shops in Europe and Japan, where it was left to die.

Nintendo explained this strategy as a means of testing the sales potential of a game which they did not feel was up to their high technical standards. Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime was infamously scathing, stating that the title was not worth $50 and singling out the "laughable" voice-acting. Yet this 'pick and choose' attitude towards its markets has been a constant source of frustration for Nintendo gamers this generation, who have seen the company refuse to release Fatal Frame 4 outside Japan or bring the highly-rated ExciteBots to Europe. It's a small but important factor in Nintendo losing the confidence of many of their longstanding fans, and Fils-Aime's comments about Disaster exemplify how poor some of their judgments for the traditional fanbase have been: yes, its voice acting is terrible. But if it weren't, and if so much of the game didn't follow suit, it wouldn't have turned out to be one of the console's most ridiculously entertaining games.

 

Games Wii Forgot: Sin & Punishment 2

SIN & PUNISHMENT: SUCCESSOR OF THE SKIES
Developer: Treasure
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: May 2010
Sales: ~270k worldwide

Although I use it occasionally, the term 'hardcore' has not sat well with me during this gaming generation. It's not just that it exemplifies a division between two markets that need not exist, but is a word whose meaning has so drastically changed over the past few years that it feels almost hypocritical to use it in a context so diametrically opposed from what it meant only during the last generation, even moreso the one before that.

In the SNES and N64/PS-eras, it loosely referred to gamers who grew up playing the toughest of the tough arcade shooters. During the PS2/XBox/GCN era, it came to mean players who had been around before Sony dragged gaming into the mainstream and were more dedicated to the medium than the wave of newcomers, derided as 'casual' gaming mercenaries for their supposed habit of just picking up whatever title was most popular at the time. The 'casual' gamers of that era then became the hardcore gamers of this one, where the 'hardcore' tag evolved again into its most scathing and segregating form, encouraged by Microsoft and Sony to differentiate their market from that of Nintendo, whose foresight in cornering a new market of non-gamers by offering accessible controls and interfaces sent Wii sales skyrocketing past its competitors. Nintendo and the Wii became synonymous with 'casual' gaming.

It's not just because I divide the vast majority of my playing time between my Wii and PC - which I maintain to be the best set-up for getting the best of both worlds, especially now that you no longer need to buy an improved graphics card for every new PC game, thanks to most of them being console ports - that this new definition doesn't ring true. In the oldest sense of the word, the Wii has hosted some of this generation's most 'hardcore' titles. In reviving the unforgiving point-and-click adventure for a new era, Zack & Wiki (which I considered for this feature, but ultimately decided was too well known) was a good example. The best, though, is one published by Nintendo themselves, a sequel to a Japan-only N64 shooter called Sin & Punishment. 

Games Wii Forgot: Little King's Story

 

LITTLE KING'S STORY
Developer: Cing
Publisher: Rising Star Games/Xseed
Released: April 09
Sales: ~240k worldwide

The two games featured so far in the Games Wii Forgot feature, which looks back at the best overlooked Wii games ahead of the E3 reveal of the console's successor Project Café, have both shown how motion controls need not be a pariah among traditional gaming experiences. Little King's Story doesn't use motion controls at all, yet is in a very different way a natural fit for its host console. It proves how deceptive appearances can be.

From the cover or any screenshot, you would be hard pressed to tell the difference between this and the countless cutesy, disposable shovelware aimed at a market of parents with too little knowledge of the medium to know better than to put up the cash in the hope of keeping their little one quiet for another ten minutes. But beneath the bright colours and twee art style lies as game as hardcore in the purest sense of the word as any on any of this generation's consoles. It's a thirty-hour experience of battling to conquer a stunningly imaginative world whose inhabitants' bold designs defy their thuggish brutality and the tactical management of your troops is key to success. It's imperial conquest in pastel colours and definitely not one for tired mothers to put in front of their little darlings.

 

Games Wii Forgot: The Godfather Blackhand Edition

THE GODFATHER: BLACKHAND EDITION
Dev/Pub: EA Redwood Shores/EA
Released: March 07
Sales: ~140k worldwide

Motion controls have become two of the most loathed words in the modern gaming vocabulary. Whether trustworthy or not, many reports of Nintendo's successor to the Wii, codenamed Project Café, have stated that the console will mark the company's return to focusing on the 'hardcore' market, with the first step being the offer of a more traditional controller. Regardless of the unlikelihood of many parts of that statement - Games Wii Forgot won't be the only articles written about the Wii and Café in the month leading up to E3 and examining the rumours surrounding the new console is definitely on the list - it does show how the Wii remote has come to embody everything so feared in more traditional circles about the influx of 'casual' gaming.

This situation may well have come about because many of the games which sold best on the Wii were ones which used motion controls poorly - think Carnival Games as an obvious example, Red Steel as the title that destroyed their credibility early on, or even their needless implementation into Donkey Kong Country Returns - while many of the ones which sold terribly would have made wonderful showcases for the technology had they enjoyed greater exposure. If you were wondering how a port of a previous generation Godfather game got only a list of games worth playing on the Wii, it's because Blackhand Edition proved that the Wii had something to offer which no other console could match.

Games Wii Forgot: Deadly Creatures

DEADLY CREATURES

Developers/Publishers: THQ

Released: Feb 2009

Sales: ~180k worldwide

Our first forgotten Wii game is the one which THQ said would decide for them whether there was a so-called 'hardcore' market on Nintendo's console. Several major publishers tried this trick, to blackmail players into buying spin-off versions of bigger franchises and promising that success would later bring more credible  franchise entries to the console: think EA's Dead Space Extraction (later given to PS3 owners for free) or Capcom's two Resident Evil rail-shooters. Respectable games on their own terms, but hardly ones destined for major success regardless of their platform, yet publishers acted astonished when none sold in their millions.

The most hilariously misguided attempt to ensnare a few extra sales in this fashion came from THQ with Deadly Creatures. Barely an interview or preview went by without players being reminded that if this game didn't clear the shelves, THQ wouldn't be bringing the rest of their amazing library to Nintendo. Now if Deadly Creatures wouldn't be the subject of this article if it weren't a terrific game. Games Wii Forgot is a tribute to all the great games that didn't sell as well as they deserved to on Nintendo's console, on the eve of the Project Café reveal on June 7th, a date confirmed last night. However, the idea that a game like this, where you alternate between controlling a tarantula or a scorpion, could ever sell more than a handful of copies just shows how, for all Nintendo's failures to make their platform accomodating to other publishers, third-parties also bear heavy responsibility for their failure to make the most of this generation's top-selling console.