craven.fr

My Christmas haul this year was pretty humbling, in that I got a lot of great stuff. I'm lucky to have such generous friends and family! Looking over it, though, one thing was striking for me: my video game presents consisted of two, third-party Wii games.

This is pretty shocking for those who follow video games closely, for two reasons: 1) There are no good Wii games that have come out in the last six months, and 2) all good Wii games are first-party, while the third-party games are all terrible.

At least, that is the conventional wisdom. Number 2, however, is often heard with the qualifier attached "except Guitar Hero", and indeed one of my two Wii games was Guitar Hero World Tour. Already having the Wii plastic guitar for Guitar Hero III meant that this was a no-brainer over the PS3 version, especially since the Wii version finally has DLC. Guitar Hero is the game I have sunk the most hours into on the Wii, and so having this next volume, with about 80 songs plus more downloadable all the time, means that my Wii will be seeing a lot of use in '09, dearth of new games or not.

Most gamers will grant that as normal, but what could my second third-party Wii game possibly be? Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09, of course! This is not as acknowledged by "gamerz" as Guitar Hero, but I find sports games ten times more fun on the Wii than on the HD consoles (where they might look better, but are less fun to play), and golf in particular I could not even imagine playing with a DualShock controller. (Most self-proclaimed hard-core gamers don't play sports games, which is probably why this point is so rarely conceded to the Wii.) In Wii Sports, golf was one of my favourites, but it only had nine holes and no real progression. Now I can play every course on the PGA tour, with multiple elements to give a real sense of progression. I'm still mastering the gameplay but I do find it to give a good enough sense of control that I'm not disappointed. I do find it kind of lame that the grass textures look worse than Wii Sports, but I waited out the '07 and '08 games for them to upgrade the graphics, so I'll take these as good enough.

Both of these are games that I see myself playing all year long, so I think they were great ones to get. When I look at the year ahead though, all the games I'm excited about are on the PS3—nothing on the Wii. Killzone 2, Street Fighter IV, Uncharted 2, Final Fantasy XIII are all games I'm really looking forward to, and I just bought LittleBigPlanet with my gift certificates. (Other older games I might yet pick up are Fallout 3, Valkyria Chronicles, and Assassin's Creed.) The Wii has nothing promising coming up, and that is a disappointment. After seeing what they could do with the controls in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, it's too bad that there aren't more serious games for the system. (Or at least, they aren't announcing them.)

Even so, I'm glad to have both a PS3 and a Wii, and will be sinking a lot of hours on both in the year ahead!

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PS. While I'm on the topic of video games, let it be known that the award for "Game of the Year" of 2008 goes to... Metal Gear Solid 4 (which moreover is quickly becoming a major contender for my personal favourite game of all time).