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Wii Music “Still Has Great Potential”
Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto has said that Wii Music “still has great potential” despite its underwhelming critical and commercial reception.
"I think it sold lower than our expectations but on the other hand it was a really unique game, I have to say," Miyamoto told ONM. "And also, even today, we are receiving several different offers from people in the field of music education, so as far as Wii Music is concerned, I think is still has great potential. And in the future there might be some developments."
Nintendo launched Wii Music and Animal Crossing for Wii at the end of last year in the hope that the titles would “revitalise the Wii market in Japan”, according to company president Satoru Iwata. In May, as part of its financial results for fiscal year 2009, Nintendo said that the titles had sold 2.65 million and 3.38 million copies respectively. While not numbers to be sniffed at, the games didn’t meet internal projections, but that doesn’t necessarily mean Nintendo will be abandoning the IP.
"We may want to think about the possibility of making some improvements, based upon the original Wii Music,” Miyamoto said of a potential follow up. "Unfortunately we don't have any news we can talk about at the moment. But like Wii Fit Plus, it's not really a sequel to the original Wii Fit - but we have added some features to improve the overall experience. It's a kind of an enhanced version of the original Wii Fit..."
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Copyright 2006 - 2009 Future Publishing Limited, Beauford Court 30 Monmouth Street Bath, UK BA1 2BW
England and Wales company registration number 2008885
My daughter and all her friends absolutely adored Wii Music, and news of a possible sequel will be music to her ears. I thought it was a novel idea that is worth pursuing.
To be honest, I think the concept was fundamentally flawed, but if you dredged some fun out of it fair play.
Somebody needs to pull Shigsies head out of his ass and put him back in front of a Mario development team...quick!
I hate it when respected artists completely lose the plot and start championing doomed to fail rubbish. I'm looking at you White Stripes, Radiohead, Rare, id and Shigsy. Why couldn't you just give us more of the same? Why try and innovate out of innovations sake? As ben has said below - why polish a turd? I couldn't agree more!
So many people complaint that companies like Activision just keep releasing the same old cookie cuter games like the gazillion Guitar Hero version, and not innovate more, just like it happened to EA when people complained that they lost the touch to release original IPs but when they bring critical acclaimed and original games like Dead Space, people go out and buy the new Madden instead...
Innovate out of innovations sake??? In case you haven't noticed there is no formula to innovate, you sometimes have to go trial and error and learn from your mistakes, if you still believe in the idea give it another try. Have the game developers will love to have games that sell +2 million units.
Was the GameCube a turd?? Probably but by "polishing" it and sticking to the idea they released the Wii, Iwata has said in multiple occasions that the GC was a cautious step towards the direction that Nintendo ended up with the release of the Wii. Guess polishing that turd of a GameCube paid off making Nintendo the winner of this generation so far and the second biggest company in Japan. Not to bad huh?
Now I didn't like Wii Music at all but at least I applaud them for trying, you can't hit the bulls eye every time. And in case you haven't notices a new Mario game is coming so don't sweat it.
I totally agree with you about yours points on innovation.
But Wii music was not a success and IMO should be one of those 'learn from your mistakes' type situations. The fact is the base model is flawed.
The Gamecube was different, at it's core it was a great console, it failed due to a lack of 3rd party suport which eventually snowballed.
"I think it sold lower than our expectations but on the other hand it was a really unique game, I have to say,"
Unique in the same way a version of Track and Field where you smashed a Wii remote into your face would be unique
Also in what possible way is this a useful educational tool over just learning the god dam instrument
and as for releasing a Wii fit plus style add on, you cant polish a turd
Wow, sure wish my polished turds could sell 2.65 million and 3.38 million copies respectively......or would those be my unpolished turds?
That would be unpolished turds. And I wish mine would sell half as much, I will be a happy game developer all the way to the bank.
The turd I referred to was the concept of using a singular remote for a plethora of instruments when only one or two of those bears semblance to the actions required to play these instruments. I bet there aren't many gamers playing guitar hero on their ordinary controller. You could argue that the wii remote is different based on it's capabilities, but it's still not a replica Strat, nor a tidy plastic drum-set.
I most certainly was not calling Gamecube a turd, nor the Wii. GC has Timesplitters 2, Windwaker, Resident Evil 4 and Mario Golf as games I will always love. I admit things looked a little grey for a while but, through innovation they nailed it with the Wii and DS.
I have nothing against innovation at all, of course, but sometimes amazing artists can be consumed by a desire to push forwards an innovative, but glaringly shallow, piece of work and that truly saddens me...though, payback is usually found later when another artist builds on the original concept and makes better games for us all to enjoy. The problem with Wii music was that other music games were already doing something similar, better, and roped in 'non-gamers' to boot. Shigsy missed the boat on this one, and tried to use innovation as the reason to release a non-starter.
Let me ask though, as a games developer, how do you feel about Wii Play and Wii Sports dominating games charts? Do you feel that these games are truly worthy of the recognition they deserve, or feel slightly cheated that they were released as a bundle or with another controller/add-on, the first of which came during the Wii remote famine that came with the consoles popularity?
and we come back to the old sales vs quality debate.
Wii music's Metacritic scores are 63 for reviews and !! 4.3!! for user scores. I know Meta critic is'nt the be all and end all but these are not great scores.