Nintendo's glorious comeback

It’s no secret that Nintendo has had an incredible year. The DS started the wave of good fortune for the old man of console gaming a few years ago and has continued to enthrall with a consistent run of good games throughout 2007 - Hotel Dusk, Final Fantasy XII: Revenent Wings, Contra IV and Dementium being but a few, but the first year of the Wii’s life has now secured Ninty a bigger comeback than Lazarus. And we’ve seen some brilliant developments for gaming as a whole as a result.

Through Nintendo’s efforts, videogames have finally truly matured to become an all-inclusive medium. No longer is gaming a niche pastime made up of a limited set of genres. Instead, the gameplay possibilities afforded by the Wii have brought a vast number of new people to the gaming party and opened up the possibilities of what interactive entertainment can be. Lets face it, in videogames we have a medium in which any kind of experience is theoretically possible and like them or not, ‘casual’ games such as Endless Ocean and Wario Ware Smooth Moves have broken the ground to allow a much broader exploration of what gaming can give us.

Of course, we’ve had an awful lot of rushed cash-in pap along the way as certain developers have struggled to quickly jump on the bandwagon, but now that designers are getting a feel for the Wii (no pun intended) we’re seeing less inane party games and instead a lot of software that bodes very well for a much more interesting future.