Thursday 4 January 2007
The popularity of Nintendo's Wii is as mainstream as it gets right now. Everyone - from little kids to teenage girls and radio DJs - is presently in a furious arm-swinging, remote-flinging frenzy over the sleek white box. So how ironic is it that the "family-friendly" system is also playing host to so many first-person shooters, that most bloody and controversial of all gaming genres?
It may be incongruous but it also makes perfect sense. The Wii-mote screams to be
The popularity of the Nintendo Wii is as mainstream as it gets right now. Everyone - from little kids and teenage girls to radio talk show hosts and cable pundits (Stephen Colbert, anyone?) - is presently in a furious arm-swinging, remote-flinging frenzy over the sleek white box. So how ironic is it that the "family-friendly" system is also playing host to so many first person shooters, that most bloody and controversial of all gaming genres?
It may be incongruous, but it also makes perfect
The thing was bigger than a house, it was uglier than a pitbull and its performance in Japan couldn't have been more of a disaster if it had launched with a game based on Hiroshima. But one thing the original Xbox was pretty much untouchable at was first-person shooters, and right at the top of the tree, just behind the powerhouse Halo twosome, was Ubisoft's fantastic Far Cry Instincts.
Instincts was magnificent for two reasons. Firstly, it flipped the FPS template on its head by setting the
