Any year with another Super Smash Bros. (Brawl this time) is a good year. Having said that, Brawl didn’t win our hearts (at least in the originality department) as much as Goichi Suda’s offbeat No More Heroes. Early 2008 was a good time for Nintendo gamers all around in fact, as the momentum of late 2007 transcended the mystical boundaries we Earthlings call ‘years’ and wowed Wii owners with treats such as the bestest version of Bully anywhere.
Meanwhile, the previously RPG-shy DS blossomed into a cacophony of +1s and -6s, as Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings, The World Ends With You, and Chrono Trigger DS grinded their way into the upper echelons of our DS Most Played list. But after that, it all went a bit mucky.
E3 2008 for Nintendo was an embarrassment of being-caught-mouthkissing-a-Birdo-poster proportions. It started well enough, with Nintendo pooping out a press release announcing the Wii MotionPlus, which promised true 1:1 motion sensing, mere seconds before the Microsoft press conference was due to begin. The only problem with that was that neither of Nintendo’s rivals unveiled their own motion-sensing sticks as was anticipated, leaving the Big N looking a little bit like they’d cacked their pants. This was nothing compared to the horrors that would unfurl on the day.
Cammie Dunaway, Nintendo of America’s vice president of sales and marketing (and one of the top 100 marketers today, according to AdAge magazine), was mommied-up to the nth degree, to the extent that onlookers expected her to run offstage to tend to a cooling pie on a windowsill at any moment. First, she wobbled on a big piece of plastic in front of a clearly distressed Shaun White, and then spent much of the next hour cooing over the dog from that crap Wii Sports Resort frisbee game. We hung our heads in shame, like teenagers at their parents’ office party.
But a wider issue was the complete lack of games announced for the second half of the year. Animal Crossing: City Folk just looked like – and turned out to be – the same game we’d already exhausted twice. The only other big hitter for Christmas 2008 was Wii Music, a game that proved divisive at best. GTA on DS was a nice surprise but we still came away feeling unsatisfied. Perhaps if Nintendo had stuck with their original plan to announce Punch-Out!! Wii at the show, things might have been viewed differently.
It was a challenging year for Nintendo’s output, with Wii Fit and Wario Land: Shake it! being a bit disappointing (although Wario’s outing was by far the best looking game of the year). But praise be for the hilariously offbeat, Japan-only Captain Rainbow, in which our hero ran around solving the trivial problems of trivial Nintendo Z-listers. And Mario Kart Wii. Although we had our doubts, it turned out to be the best Mario Kart in years, and it was the game that finally, finally saw Nintendo nail online gaming, giving gamers hope for better things as we headed into the end of the decade.
2008 VERDICT: 8
The DS enjoyed its fourth strong year in a row, but after a great start the Wii found its games drying up as publishers cranked the crap-o-meter up a notch. MotionPlus left gamers optimistic, mind.
2009
Do you remember the year 2009? Unless you’re auditioning for the lead in Memento 2, you really ought to – it was only a few months ago. But what do you remember it for? Although it wasn’t a vintage year, there are still plenty of valid answers.
Perhaps you were on the move a lot during 2009, in which case you’ll remember it as The Year Your DS Earned You Strange Looks From Fellow Passengers. Nintendo don’t often do comedy, but when they do, it rarely falls flat. Mario & Luigi saw a different side of Bowser – the inside – in Bowser’s Inside Story, with predictably rib-tickling results. A less obvious source of laughter was Zelda: Spirit Tracks, but hilarious banter between Link and a freshly deceased ghost Zelda made this an adventure to remember.
Or perhaps you’re a sports fan? Wii Sports Resort’s slick, responsive swordplay made 2006’s Red Steel cry pixelated tears; Tiger Woods 10 became the best golf game ever almost effortlessly (but it remained the world’s worst driving sim); while Grand Slam Tennis made Wii Sports look like a toy. And just think – this was the ‘dodgy’ launch batch of games! Now all they need to do is, er, make more games for it. Anyone?
Or maybe the end of a decade inspired you to look back at your life, in which case Nintendo was right there with you. Punch-Out!! seemed a strange choice for a revival at first, but once you laced up controllers it made perfect sense. GameCube titles such as Mario Power Tennis and Pikmin were exhumed with bolted-on Wii controls, which was a bit cheeky, but Nintendo restored their karma by dishing out the same treatment to Metroid Prime 1 and 2, and then bundling them in the same box as Metroid Prime 3 for the price of one game. Bargain of the decade!
But no game was more defiantly old-school than New Super Mario Bros. Wii. The first home console 2D Mario game for 20 years, it was a killer combination of Mario Bros 1, 3 and World’s best bits bundled with a frantic multiplayer option, but a lack of innovation in its own right prevented it from soaring to the same heights as its source material. Just don’t keep us waiting until 2030 for a sequel, Nintendo.
When you think of 2009, you might also think of loading bars. Nintendo hopped onto the iPhone bandwagon by launching the DSi, effectively a DS Lite with a teeny camera and a software update that allowed its owners to download tiny games through the DSiWare service. A further hardware revision in the suitcase-sized DSi LL (known as the DSi XL in the west and due here in April) boasted screens so big that even your prune-eyed grandmum could play.
Of course, most people remember 2009 for the global recession, and Activision’s bizarre response to the challenging economic conditions was to bundle their games with plastic crap and charge up the wazoo for it. DJ Hero was almost worth it. Tony Hawk’s Ride? Not so much.
It was a decade of ups and downs for Nintendo, but through perseverance, insight, bravery and a lot of luck, they clawed their way back to the top, delivering some of the best games ever in the process. There’s no reason why the next decade can’t be even better.
2009 VERDICT: 7
A year where the big hitters disappointed slightly but the underdogs (Little King’s Story, Muramasa) came through. Expect much better from Nintendo in 2010. And more surprises.
Mar 5, 2010
