On a trip to my nearest video game distributor (I won’t name names, but people often stop to get games there) I found that my eye was caught on the selection of games for the Nintendo Wii. For a moment, I thought that Disney might have bought out Nintendo: the percentage of licensed games was overwhelming compared to the actual number of games available. All I saw, other than a scant few copies of Zelda and Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition were copies of games like Cars, Meet the Robinsons, and Surfs Up (Ok, that’s not Disney, but you get my point). If the Wii is selling like hotcakes and aiming to get casual and serious gamers interested, then why are there so few serious games to go with the casual ones?

To be fair, it is a very new system and publishers need time to get used to the hardware before they can make proper software. But the GameCube did poorly as a system because of the lack of compelling games and the plethora of games aimed only at children. It is clear that Nintendo is trying to reach kids and perhaps people that did not play games before (hence the introduction of the Wii Fit at this years E3), but it is not trying to pull in the people who actually care about gaming as a hobby and sometimes as a way of life: the serious gamers.

The message that Nintendo is sending is that they want everyone to game, but if that means catering only to those who do not play regularly then the real gamers who can make or break the success of a system will go elsewhere for their adult-aimed games. Nintendo may be successful financially, but once the novelty of the motion-sensing controllers wears off a lot of real gamers feel let down by the vapid games. We crave depth to our games which includes story and game play and then graphics, and since the Wii is not the graphics powerhouse that the other two systems are, we can only hope for the first two.

Thank God for the virtual console or else the system wouldn’t have much of a leg to stand on right now. Super Mario Galaxy is something we can all look forward to, but for now I’ll play some Donkey Kong Country and then maybe do something else for a while.