Good marketing idea?

Many gamers are against the idea of creating a console for non-gamers. I am against that idea too, because that idea will actually end up appealing to nobody instead of everybody. It will alienate hardcore gamers, and non-gamers will still not know how to play. I have seen people who do not know how to play other consoles be just as clueless about the Wii. You cannot please everyone. There is no such thing as "fun for the whole family".

First is the worst

Whenever a product is the first to do something, people get excited, forgetting that when something is the first of its kind, it is usually the most poorly executed because there is nothing to compete with or improve on, and there has never been a product before it that had the same feature, so the creators would not know what to fix.

When the N64 had the first main controller to have a control stick, customers were excited, but the product was flawed. Out of the current five Nintendo consoles' main controllers, the N64 controller is my least favorite, because it is unevenly set up, and is not very durable, especially when it comes to the control stick. It lacked the brawn it needed to last through plenty of use. Fortunately, the control sticks for other consoles fixed those problems.

The Wiimote got customers excited too, and caused them to forget about the possibility of it not working. Countless games on the Wii resulted in more complaints about the motion controls not working than praise for the innovation. We must remember that because the Wiimote is the first main controller to have a special feature that no other controller has had before, it is the "primitive" edition, and motion controls for any future consoles will likely be a dramatic improvement over it.

If you are a reviewer, it is very important to wait to review games until they are not new anymore and the problems with the game are not obscured by hype. This is the case with Wii Sports 1, which every Wii owner knows is one of the first games for the Wii. This game and Wii Play both failed to show the true abilities of the Wiimote. Most of the events in Wii Play involved pointing at the screen and maybe turning the Wiimote. The controls in the events in Wii Sports 1 were little more than swinging. Until Wii Sports Resort came out, all the Wiimote could do was point, tilt, and swing.

The Boxing event in Wii Sports 1 is the average least favorite event out of the five. This is because the controls are very unresponsive. Kids who run up to the screen and swing like crazy often have more luck than those who try to come up with a strategy, at least for the first few rounds, because your beginning opponents barely make any attempt to attack you. There is almost no way you can lose. In the Showdown mode, which is part of Sword Fighting, by far the most popular event in Wii Sports Resort, the first level is a joke. You can win just by holding the Wiimote in front of you and jumping up and down until you finish. There is the possibility of getting hit once, but this level is too easy because the enemies barely attack you. I am happy to report that this problem has been fixed in all of the other levels, as the same strategy I mentioned before resulted in quickly losing to the first enemy that wears a red suit.

One more thing: In order to get the Wii Motion Plus to work correctly, you have to lock it in.

Make your review look better

Here is some advice on how to rate graphics. First, I would like to tell you not to say that gameplay is more important than graphics. Graphics are more important than you think. With good graphics, you can tell what everything is, where the hit boxes are, and what is crucial to your progress. For some reviewers, the "Graphics" category is a throwaway one, just like "Replay Value". By that, I mean that graphics can sometimes be just another way for a fanatic to praise, or a "hater" to bash a game. Some people, if they like a game, but notice that the graphics are not very good, say "they were good for the time". How do you know that? What a cop-out! I was not a gamer when the NES and SNES had graphical advances or any other kind of revolutionary feature, so I do not care about how good something was "back in the day". I care about how not obsolete it is against all these other new ones. I love Mario Golf 64, and even I am willing to admit that the graphics are in no way revolutionary or state-of-the-art. They were not "good for the time". I still like them, and wish they could be repeated in future installments of the Mario Golf series, but they are not standard-setters. Neither were the graphics on any other N64 game. The N64DD looked cool, and I would have rather had that than the Game Cube, but I understand why the Nintendo company decided to go with the Game Cube: they were tired of two-dimensional fences and blurry signs. Paper Mario 1 made a farce of the N64's graphics. And I must stress again, for those of you who are retro game fanatics, stop giving 8-bit graphics a free ride. You cannot just like graphics for what games they are in.

I am fully aware of the fact that I mention Mario Golf and Lost Levels in a lot of my blog posts.

Reviewing Difficulty

Here is another section that needs work for some reviewers: the Difficulty section.

I have to say this first: Do not rate the difficulty of a game from 1 to 10 based on how hard the game is, especially if you are doing averages, which is a very tacky method of reviewing, since not all of the categories of the game are equally important (Retro fanatics have over-stressed this: "Graphics are not as important as gameplay". Come on, tell us something we have not already heard so many other times). And it is all the more flawed if one of the categories is not a direct measure of how good a part of a game is. Instead, score that category based on how good the difficulty curve is. Even the most notoriously difficult games have a few easy levels to start you off with. Super Mario Brothers 2: The Lost Levels had an excellent difficulty curve, one that you would find in normal games. In games that are nonlinear, such as Mega Man platformers (obviously) and the Mario Golf series, rate the learning curve, which is how quickly you can get the hang of the game, or just do not have that section at all.

Replayability Values

I can honestly tell you that replay value is not a good category to include in a review.

Most of the time, reviewers' scores for Replay Value is heavily based on a bias for a game or system you grew up with. Every system that came before or after will usually get lower ratings of replay value. For example, I grew up with the N64, and I find NES games to significantly lack replay value because of a lack of save features, difficulty that sometimes feels unfair, lack of nonlinearity or extra content, the fact that the games are usually short, and usually, lame endings. People who grew up with NES games inherently love them and do not mind playing them over and over again. Scores for replay value are commonly similar to those of the "gameplay" category, and are just an extra category for fanatics or haters. Sometimes, games can score more "replayability" points than "gameplay" points. As you know if you are a reviewer, these instances are very rare. Replay value is very important to me, but it is not a good category to put in a review.

Being a critic of any kind does not require any experience or training. So gamers, try not to make it look like that!