2009's best Wii games (that died at retail)

We began this year full of hope for software success on the Wii, the little system that did. As it entered its third year on the market, fans dreamed of seeing the end of shovelware, as developers had now had plenty of time to make great games for the console. Maybe we’d see some great original content at last? No more PSP ports and half-finished releases, now that developers had come to understand the console so well? Well, yes and no. This year saw plenty of quality Wii games that took some real risks, along with many, many, many more that kept the stream of crap flowing to the system.

But saddest of all was that for every inventive, interesting risk taken by publishers like Sega, XSeed, or THQ, there were easily twice as many quick-and-dirty releases that probably outsold them, and were sometimes even made by the same companies. So let's take a look at the unfortunate year that was, during which hopeful fans got their wish for hardcore Wii games, and then got to see those same games wither on the vine.

Dead Space Extraction

2009 was a huge year for on-rails Wii shooters, and we enjoyed every minute of it. Sure, to some the genre is a boring, repetitive experience that offers almost no room for creativity. And while we'll agree that these games are a slight cop-out, in that their fixed perspectives yield some of the best graphics on the Wii, several creative companies got much more out of these once-arcadey games than that. Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles had some old-fashioned (if somewhat predictable) thrills mixed with its good looks, and House of the Dead: Overkill gave the world the swearingest game ever to go with the over-the-top, campy gore. But the best of the year was EA's Dead Space Extraction.

Taking place during the destruction of the Ishimura spacecraft before the start of the first game, Extraction filled in some of Dead Space's back-story while telling its own tense tale of a group of survivors trying to get off the ship. Sporting perhaps the best graphics on the Wii all year, the cinematic tale amazed us even as it simultaneously creeped us the hell out. Though it isn't the longest game, and doesn’t have a ton of replay value, it's an astonishing ride while it lasts. Sadly, very few gamers gave it a try, and it sold only a pitiful 9,000 copies in the first week of sales.
 
Eclipsed by: Nerf N-Strike Elite 

Meanwhile, EA released this gem a few weeks later, a sequel to last year's top-selling shooter. Fortunately, this one is made safe for Billy and Sally by having you take down enemies with soft foam projectiles. We're not saying that all games should be M-rated, and this got some slightly above-average reviews, but the very real chance that this toy (it’s packaged with a Nerf gun) could possibly sell more than all three games mentioned above combined is more than a little annoying.

Muramasa and Little King’s Story

One Japanese publisher that’s really stood behind the Wii is Marvelous Entertainment. Best known as the company behind Harvest Moon, it was also the Japanese publisher for No More Heroes. It kept the Wii love going by publishing (in Japan) two new properties for the console this year that got lots of international kudos: Muramasa and Little King’s Story.

Muramasa, with its astonishing 2D art and old-school hack ‘n' slash gameplay, won a lot of hardcore hearts, thanks to twitchy samurai swordfights and giant boss battles. Plus, US publisher Ignition made the risky but admirable decision to keep the Japanese voice track, which kept the game’s feudal-Japan flavor intact.

Meanwhile, Little King’s Story had an attractive combination of cute visuals, RPG elements and RTS gameplay, as you helped a diminutive ruler slowly rebuild his kingdom. But despite all the nice things we (and other outlets) said about them, it just didn’t translate to money at the register. The total US sales for these games haven’t been widely publicized, but Marvelous has let out the sad news that only one of the four Wii games it released in Japan during the first half of ’09 made a profit.

Eclipsed by: Valhalla Knights: Eldar Saga

Sadly, not all Marvelous games are, well… marvelous. Take Valhalla Knights: Eldar Saga for instance. Technically this is a bit of a cheat on our format, as this sold pretty badly in the US, but this sloppy PSP port is a textbook example of what the Wii doesn’t need. It looked like garbage, with a color palette of grays and light grays, and played like an exercise in tedium. So how about we pretend it never happened?