Pokemon and Nintendo's General Laziness - Misfit's Blog

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Pokemon and Nintendo's General Laziness

Posted on March 18, 2010 at 10:16 PM.

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Nintendo recently released remakes of its popular Pokemon Gold and Silver games on the DS. Some mini games were added, the visuals improved with the use of the Pokemon Diamond and Pearl engine, and a Tamagotchi-like device comes packaged with the games to differentiate them from the originals which came out over 10 years ago. If you were active in the Pokemon craze back then, you'd remember that Pokemon Gold and Silver were basically the same as Red and Blue which slightly updated visuals (to take advantage of the then new Gameboy Color) and a roster of new Pokemon.

It has become a trend for Nintendo to stick with what works and I'm getting pretty annoyed with their risk-free approach. The Pokemon franchise is just the easiest example as the game really hasn't changed much at all from the original titles released on the Gameboy all those years ago. The DS games still use still images for the battle menus with minimal animation! What was necessary for Gameboy is not necessary for a DS game (or a Gameboy Advance game, for that matter). Nintendo just dresses up the game with a few new gimmicks every couple of years and profits. And while its easy to blame the consumer, most of the big review sites gush over Nintendo's tired act.

I enjoyed New Super Mario Bros as much as the next guy, but I know its essentially a remake of a 3 year old DS game. Metroid Prime 3 was just the same as the previous two, just with a new control scheme. The new Metroid coming out this summer is basically a new Super Metroid, right down to the Wii-mote only control scheme (same as NSMB).

I was pretty excited when the Wii first came along. The interface, while perhaps not quite as revolutionary as some expected, was quite a leap forward. However, what has Nintendo done to move us past Wii Sports? Not much. Wii-motion Plus is kind of cool, but it still isn't quite the 1:1 control Nintendo promised and they've done almost nothing to support it (thankfully, EA and Ubisoft are taking a shot). Now we get to see if Sony and Microsoft can beat them at their own game this summer.

Even before the Wii though, this was a major issue. Look at the Gamecube, outside of Retro studios take on Metroid, what did Nintendo bring to the table? They stuck a backpack on Mario 64 and called it Mario Sunshine. The Twilight Princess was a shiny new Ocarina of Time with a bad gimmick (and again, few review sites called out Nintendo on the poorly designed Wolf areas of that game) and the system was flooded with shovel ware like Mario Party. The Gameboy Advance went through its life cycle without an original Mario title, just re-releases of NES and SNES games. The DS had to settle for a Mario 64 port initially before NSMB came along, which while new, didn't exactly re-invent the wheel.

I'm not arguing that Nintendo should abandon giving us some tried and true gameplay. Nostalgia is great and I love the Virtual Console, but we need something fresh to balance things out. Super Mario Galaxy is the only significant first-party release on the Wii, the best-selling console in the marketplace. That's all you can manage Nintendo? Going back to the NES, Nintendo systems could be counted on for the best first-party software. The quality third-party stuff may be rare, but you always could rely on Nintendo. Now its no contest, Sony's machine has the best first-party support and I'm not sure who to rank second but it doesn't matter.

Other than the previously mentioned Metroid title, the only other big Nintendo game we have to look forward to this year is Super Mario Galaxy 2. The first Galaxy was excellent so I'll likely end up a sucker and get the new one, but I'm not excited by it. It would be nice if the mainstream publications could start to rip into Nintendo but I just don't know if its going to happen. Nintendo could not have had a worse E3 than the one they had in '08, and '09 wasn't much better, but you wouldn't know it by reading IGN and Gamestop.