Is it fair to rate all Wii games using our system?

By Stephen Munn | July 29, 2008

Some amount of squirming has been taking place for some time now over the perceived quality of Wii games as compared to Xbox 360 or PS3 games as measured in gaming site reviews. It’s not an easy subject to approach as someone who’s part of the business (or part of the problem, depending on how you look at it) but let me see if I can unroll this and you can make your own decision.

Nintendo’s much-applauded adoption of a “blue ocean” strategy, an attempt to target their Wii console at a much broader audience than their previous systems and ideally, the competition, has clearly paid off for them handsomely. In fact, Wii has enjoyed continuous popularity among much of the public for most, if not all, of its lifespan. Naturally, whenever something appears in gaming that isn’t for one specific fanboy, whether than fanboy owns the system or not, that fanboy tends to stomp their feet and scream angrily. A great example is High Voltage software’s Dora the Explorer game that was announced for Wii at this year’s E3. The comments I’ve seen on the announcement are astonishing. Did these people buy every Dora game to this point, and they don’t like that it’s not mature enough for modern gamers? Has Dora been taken in a direction you don’t approve of? Should it have been a first person shooter? Hey, wait a minute, that’s a great idea.

Before I get too absorbed in what could happen to Swiper the Fox in a Dora FPS, let me get back on track.

Carnival Games from 2k, one of Wii’s top selling titles which has met with lukewarm reviews, has sold mainly on word of mouth. I’ve personally heard people at work raving over this game, a game that has become a punchline on websites and podcasts for its odd sales-to-rating ratio. Is it fair for gaming sites like ours as well as bigger sites like IGN, Gamespot and 1up to review games that aren’t intended for our audience?

Certainly, we need these sites to review these games so we can make an educated guess, based on how our tastes align with those of the reviewer, if a game like Carnival Games is for us. The problem comes in when people start aggregating the scores from all these sites and citing these aggregates as a measure of the quality of the game for the bulk of the population who might play the game. We’ve heard this argument before, to be sure. It’s important to remember that just because a console is for everyone, not every game is going to be.

Asking people to take a deep breath, try what they can on every system, and play what they like might be a waste of time. We’re all going to encounter the fanboys daily who decide that a broken EA PS3 port of a Valve PC game is Sony’s fault because Microsoft’s console is better, despite the logical chasms present.

I miss the days when I bought my games and played them and liked them, and didn’t worry about what everyone else was playing or whether or not every game coming out for the console I owned rated a 9/10 in EGM. People need to stop taking every Wii game that’s announced or released that they don’t want as a direct affront or insult. It’s one thing to get annoyed when nobody’s managed to produce a great racing game on Wii despite a dozen attempts, it’s another when Koji Igarashi tries to do something new with Castlevania for Wii owners and only gets hate.