Nintendo and the Decline of Hardcore Gaming 438
angry tapir writes "Chris Jager from GoodGearGuide argues that the rise of casual gaming means near-certain death for hardcore gaming. The sales of casual 'party-friendly' games are massively outstripping the sales of classic hardcore games, and the makers of other consoles are taking note of Nintendo's success in attracting non-traditional gamers to the Wii and DS. There is evidence that Sony and Microsoft are both trying to tap into the casual market, and it's only a matter of time before hardcore gaming goes the way of the Nintendo PowerGlove."
Of course, the trend toward casual doesn't just involve Nintendo — World of Warcraft's success (and the huge effect it's had on the MMO genre) is often credited to its focus on casual gamers. While it's not unreasonable for game studios to want all players to see all of the game's content, perhaps there's a better way of catering to the more hardcore players than tacking on difficulty modes and "do it the hard way" achievements.
My first gaming experience. (Score:3, Interesting)
Aside from the vastly outdated Atari 2600 in my basement as a child I was first exposed to gaming in the form of Super Mario Bros., Duck Hunt, and Metroid. :/
I look at some of the games today and while I find them visually appealing, they just don't seem to have the same drawing power.
Re:My first gaming experience. (Score:5, Interesting)
To the young'uns, these newfangled games have even more drawing power than Mario or Metroid ever did for us. Not only are they more shinny, but they also include Trendy Animated Character Du Jour, which kids have been getting trained to love for years before the video game tie-in is even made.
Oh no, we're all gonna die (Score:5, Interesting)
Scan down on this series of graphs [anandtech.com] that Nintendo showed at the GDC to the graph titled "Nintendo driving US Growth." The level of sales of games across all platforms has been fairly flat for most of the decade... up until the Wii came out, at which point the other two consoles continued to sell at a mostly flat rate but Nintendo's went up and up.
It's sort of a harbinger and a point of relief. On the one hand, When you've hit a wall on the number of people who are really interested in devoting so much of their time to a 40+ hour game, the only way to go up is with people who aren't in that group. Microsoft wants more money just like everyone else, so they have to expand into the same area. But it's still a mark that there's a solid base of hardcore fans as well that are always going to need to be served, and when Microsoft's plans to make the XBox wii-ish fails to bring in a large new audience because they realize that they're not the Wii, they're going to have to think about serving the base that they've got already.
I'm also a bit loathe to decry the sudden death of hardcore gaming when just last year, 2008, we were decrying the fact that we were trying to find time to play Fable 2, MGS4, GTA4, Fallout 3, and a host of other solid games. The fact that release schedules aren't lining up very well in this year's favor isn't going to scare me off just yet, and that's just about the only real evidence that he offers that the hardcore gamer is about to die. What's more likely is that we just won't have the same glut of triple-A-grade content devoted to them.
I don't know why the hardcore gamers are worried, though. They're just gonna spend all their time playing Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2 in a couple of years anyway.
More like the decline of the Wii.... (Score:4, Interesting)
April 6, 2009 - Sony's PS3 outsold Nintendo's Wii during the month of March. Sales of the PS3 were reported at 146,948 units as opposed to the 99,335 Wii units sold. In third place, the Xbox 360 is noted to have 43,172 units sold.
Apparently, Ryu Ga Gotoku 3 (or Yakuza 3, here in the U.S.) and Resident Evil 5 helped urge the PS3 sales, as both games were at the top of the software sales charts. This is, comparatively speaking, good news for Sony's current-gen hardware, though analysts predict that the PS3 will not threaten the Wii's global dominance of the market.
http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSTRE53511I20090406 [reuters.com]
TOKYO - Nintendo admitted Thursday that its hit Wii video game console was going through its toughest time yet in the competitive Japanese market, but it said there was no plan to cut the price.
"The Wii is in the most unhealthy condition since it hit the Japanese market," Nintendo Co. president Satoru Iwata said. "The current condition in the Japanese market is not the one we want."
But a price war with rivals was not the answer as Nintendo is already the market leader, he said.
"A price cut in a difficult economy cannot really excite the market and drive up sales. As of now I really don't think that a price cut is a good option for us," he told a news conference.
Industry figures showed this week that the rival Sony PlayStation 3 had outsold the Wii in Japan for the first time in 16 months, with sales of the Nintendo console dropping almost two-thirds from a year earlier.
http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/technology/04/09/09/nintendo-says-wii-losing-luster-no-price-cut [abs-cbnnews.com]
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Maybe the casual gamers have moved on and now only the hardcore gamers remain to purchase new software and peripherals? The Wii is at market saturation nearly everywhere and now it's time for the PS3 and X360 to move ahead at least in month to month sales.
For some anecdotal evidence I own all three consoles, each one since their own launch date, and I never touch my Wii (cue childish sexual jokes). In the last month I've hammered away at Valkyria Chronicles and Metal Gear Online for my PS3 for hours upon hours every day. For my 360 I play Virtua Fighter 5 and Fallout 3 regularly as well. And between both the PS3 and 360 I play Street Fighter II HD Remix and Street Fighter IV daily as well. My Wii? Maybe when Dead Space Wii comes out I'll plug the console back in but my god has that thing been collecting dust for months.
Not to mention what hardcore treats the PC is getting coming up by way of Blizzard. I already told my boss I needed a week of vacation off for both of the releases of Starcraft II and Diablo III...
Is hardcore gaming dead because of the Wii? No. Nintendo can't stroke its ego quite that much.
Re:WoW is NOT casual gamer friendly! (Score:5, Interesting)
I was a casual gamer who didn't buy gold and yet I enjoyed the game immensely. It's not that hard to make money in the game if you do a bit of research. I played no more than 20 hours a week and yet when I quit I had about 4000 gold at level 66.
20 hours a week is a lot of time. Is that really casual? If you said you played a sport for 20 hours a week would you call that casual? "I play baseball casually 20 hours a week". Sounds hardcore to me as it's quite an investment.
Casual != !hard-core (Score:5, Interesting)
If you "do a bit of research" into a game's economy then you're not a casual gamer. If you play 20 hours a week then you're not a casual gamer, and if you play the same game for 20 hours then you're probably also moving up into the "committed gamer" bracket.
Hardcore gaming is dying but not because of casual (Score:3, Interesting)
The death of hardcore gaming is happening because of the rising dev costs with stagnating sales. The core market is limited in size, it's not really growing much and as such the sales are limited. The focus on graphics among the HD consoles massively increases the development costs (factor 2.5) while very few additional sales are gained from the better graphics (and few sales are lost by having weaker graphics). Without casual gaming it wouldn't survive either because it's collapsing under its own weight, not anything else's.
The success of "casual" gaming merely comes from the massive numbers of people outside the core market who were previously unwilling to buy games. However, their demands aren't going to stay rock-bottom forever and producing highly profitable games with a cheap and crappy dev team in a few months won't work forever. While more complex games aimed at these people will have to look different from the ones that are being aimed at the hardcore they're by no means impossible. Applying the term "casual" however is wrong, these people can and will get very involved in a game they play, possibly moreso than "hardcore" gamers judging by the difficulty modern core games are dumbed down to. That should be considered, we're not talking about people who play a game for five minutes and then put it on a shelf, they've got attention spans much longer than the traditional gamers though they may have less time per game session.
Re:Wait, what?! (Score:3, Interesting)
Indeed, it's been frequently pointed out [isthereason.com] that "casual games" aren't defined by how much people actually play them, but by the perceived time sink. If you in theory could play 20 minutes, it's a casual game, even if a large proportion of people play 5-hour stretches.
Re:WoW is NOT casual gamer friendly! (Score:3, Interesting)
I spent less time per week earning my degree!
Re:WoW is NOT casual gamer friendly! (Score:5, Interesting)
Show me the reason you need to buy gold.
I am decidedly in the 'avid' category for WoW (I'm not sure I'd say 'hardcore'), since I average 15-20 hours per week. So I'm not representative. Neither are my friends, who all have over 2000 hours of playtime over the last 4 years.
That said, you can easily make 100g in a single hour. Icecrown dailies run ~13g each, and they take less than 5 minutes in most cases. Then there's WG, which is pretty much a guaranteed 40-50g in 30 minutes or less (typically more like 20 on my server).
So, yeah, at that rate, I don't see why anyone would need to buy gold. One hour a day for a month and a half and you have 5000g.
Now, if you want to argue that your time is worth more than the cost of the gold, that's possibly a decent argument. But it's not like the game is making it hard. There are plenty of casual WoW players who get their gold through quests and dailies, and they have access to the same stuff as everyone else - it just takes a bit longer.
It's not like you can buy good gear with gold anyway. Gold is basically for augments (enchants/inscriptions/thread/etc.), gems, and misc items like repairs, mounts, and respeccing.
To tell the truth, no multi-player game truly is. Either it's too easy/random (e.g. MarioKart Wii) or it's too challenging. Games that are too easy/random aren't rewarding long-term because there's little opportunity to improve. Games that are too challenging make it difficult for casual players to play.
You, as a casual player, are never going to beat my 2v2 team. We're not exactly "hot shit", but we just missed Deulist last season, which means that we are better than 97% of the arena teams in the game. You need to invest a significant amount of time and practice to get into the top 3%; we played over 600 games in Season 5 alone, and we've already played over 150 games in Season 6 (which started 3 days ago).
There are three options if you're a casual player. You can accept that you're not going to compete with hardcore (or even semi-hardcore) gamers and have fun. You can become a hardcore or semi-hardcore gamer. Or you can stop playing the game because you realize that it doesn't matter.
Buying gold (or even a character) isn't one of those options. It doesn't make you a better player, it doesn't really get you better gear, and it's not going to enable you to compete with hardcore gamers. To put it bluntly, it's blatantly obvious who belongs in high-end raid content and who doesn't. And it's just as obvious who bought their characters in arenas or BGs. Skill is not something that you can buy, and despite popular opinions, skill still plays a major role in WoW. The first season I ever played arenas seriously (Season 2), we ended at 1690. In Season 3 we ended at 1776. In Season 4 we ended at 1840. Despite the challenges in Season 5 (DK/Holy Paladins, Hunters), we still ended at 1940. And in Season 6 our MMR is already above 2100 (albeit largely because of balance changes).
Sidenote: For anyone who claims I play too much WoW, consider this: how much time do you spend watching TV every week? I spend about 2.5 hours per day on WoW, which is about as much time as the average American spends watching TV. I can't argue that playing WoW is a 'better' use of my time than watching TV, but I do find it more enjoyable than watching TV.
Re:My first gaming experience. (Score:5, Interesting)
You mean Mario Galaxy, Wii Play (Duck Hunt+) and Metroid Prime 3? To be honest, I think Nintendo is the only one who has stuck to what they're good at: Making good games.
It's not about the games... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Where there's a will... (Score:5, Interesting)
Take Stardock, for example. They saw the opportunity created by game companies moving to making console games because the market was bigger and they could get better copy protection. They've been making money hand over fist because they recognized that the PC market was alive and well and nearly vacant, despite the articles about PC gaming dying. The games they make are hardcore games that are also old school and dependable. They're not spectacular, but they know their audience and they serve the hell out of it.
So, if casual gaming ever eclipses hardcore gaming to the extent that computer gaming eclipses pen and paper, there will still be companies like Stardock that serve the market. Hardcore gamers will never disappear, and companies that are looking to make millions upon billions of dollars probably won't serve them, but companies that recognize the potential and have talent and a passion for gaming will still serve it.
Re:My first gaming experience. (Score:5, Interesting)
I suppose that could have some truth. otoh, the enjoyment in playing games while growing up with hasn't been surpassed by the new shinier things, even though I also was dragged in the 90s with the "upgrade to the next graphics card for more shinyness", always coming closer to "more reality", "better FPS", I've been there...
I've played through the NFS titles, enjoyed how they evolved, got better, more realistic, but I never spent as much time on any title as NFS2. Same with GTA. Halflife is something else though, the submerging in HF2 was amazing for the few weekends I've spent on it.
It's hard to tell, for me, wherever it's "nostalgia", the own reference and gameindustry playing on it. (remember the gameboy & tetris hype? Donkey Kong handhelds? Arcades even?) Today, my time is more limited, the context and stories of the games have changed which change the gameplay, and somehow I stopped caring for "better graphics", I was excited about DOOM3, before it came out, but soon the next-gen DirectX games came out and the novelty was lost. Maybe it's context, personal frame of refence (up from a fex pixel on a screen to DukeNukem was a very exciting improvement in 'graphics', today, the bottom standard is pretty high compared to the age where buying a 32mb RAM module would give you a smoother and more "detailed" experience), I don't know. I've stopped gaming because I work more then I have free time, so I make good use of my free time living in the real world as most of my professional life is behind a screen writing virtual things.
And? (Score:4, Interesting)
Please, tell me what's new?
I owned over 200 Spectrum games, I completed *exactly* one (Nonterraqueous). If you go by the number of games that can't *be* completed but which I got very, very, very involved in, then you can probably include the Gauntlet series, Chaos, Bruce Lee and Target:Renegade. I pored thousands of hours into games over several years, but only managed to complete less than 1% of them. That *doesn't* necessarily make me a casual gamer, it just means that I got bored of most of the games quite quickly and played something more interesting. If you look through my software libraries of the time, you can see exactly where the most time was spent and there are entire *years* where I didn't play the new games I was buying because I was so busy with the old ones. Does hardcore gamer mean "plays a lot of games", "spends a lot of time playing games", "plays games through to the absolute finish", "plays the newest games" or what? It's such an obscure term it could mean anything, and technically I've been in all those categories for parts of my gaming life.
Casual games *are* played by hardcore gamers, it all depends on what and how you want to do with them. When I bought Half-Life 2, I played it through on Medium difficulty. Why? Life is too short to spend thousands of hours on the extreme levels reloading and reloading to get the perfect 100-health, every objective run. But some people did just that. Does that mean that I'm somehow in the same market as the Wii "wiggle the controller once a minute" crowd, or that I am somehow vastly different from that crowd? No. I actually play things like WiiSports all the time, but also find that you just cannot get a good FPS/strategy on such machines. My most common games to play are the old games I used to own via emulation... does that mean I'm not a "hardcore" gamer? I spent hundreds of hours honing my skills on CS and CS:CZ, does that make me one?
The elements that, to me, make a "hardcore" gamer are:
Time dedicated to the task.
Difficulty of the task to a new player.
Thus, it has *nothing* to do what the actual games that are played. It's like saying that a professional tennis player is a "hardcore sportsman" but that someone who spends every spare moment they have running but doesn't actually compete isn't one. It's really just a matter of dedication.
Just a few categories to jog people's brains but are the following considered "hardcore" gamers or not: NES Speedrun fanatics? Professional Counterstrike players? Dedicated Counterstrike players that don't compete?
So discussing hardcore gamers as something seperate from casual gamers (although we can all pick out the two from our friends without needing a formal definition) is crazy. The game I spent five minutes on might well be considered a "hardcore" game. I've never even *loaded* World of Warcraft... does that make me ineligible? But what about the time and money spent, and the skills gained on a ten-year-old game? That doesn't count?
Hardcore gamers will always want different games to casual gamers. The proportion of each in the world has changed recently, but it doesn't mean *anything* can be predicted from it. For all we know, it might mean that in ten years time *everyone* is a hardcore gamer because they were introduced gradually to games by the casual games and sought out more. Hardcore games won't die while someone wants to pay for them. Casual games won't die while someone wants to pay for them. Discounting actual hardware inadequacies, both types of game can be produced for any hardware. Nothing's going to change.
Re:Does not follow. (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, they do. I know this because myself and most of my previously-hardcore gamer friends are not gamers anymore, and if I'm going to be gaming it's only casual games these days. Why? Mostly out of necessity; I got older, and found my priorities for my time had changed. You just can't sink the time required to be a hardcore gamer anymore, unless you're young and/or don't have anything else to do in your life.
Do I miss it? Kinda, but mostly only due to nostalgia. I value the time I spend with my girlfriend far more than games, so it's a fair trade. :)
Re:Where there's a will... (Score:2, Interesting)
That is casual.
Re:WOW certainly isn't just casual game play (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:My first gaming experience. (Score:3, Interesting)
...Nintendo is the only one who has stuck to what they're good at: Making good games.
Quite optimistic.
...and it works !
:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpYty1PaZLM [youtube.com]
Let's say : Nintendo found out that some people are bored of being assraped by Valve/EA games/and so on...
Hardcore gaming only means:
"Hey kid ! Ask your dad to pay you another brand new graphic card just in order to play the same game, but with 3* more polygons !! Isn't that totally HARDCORE !?! Yeahh !! And if you don't do so, you'll be the pwned looser of your class !!11!1 LOL"
Nintendo just says:
"You're not hardcore ? You f*cking don't care about FPS, polygons and vertex shaders? Here are some games for you !"
From my point of view, today, "hardcore gaming" is just like a Wild Wacky Action Bike
Re:WOW certainly isn't just casual game play (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not a console gamer at all but do play on the PC. My wife and I were at a friends house a week or two ago and they have a Wii. One of their friends came over and brought two additional controllers (so there were four). We bowled and played a bit of the other games that night. The next day my wife was on Craigslist looking for a used Wii :)
[John]
Re:Wait, what?! (Score:3, Interesting)
People losing their jobs, homes, families, etc. to World of Warcraft is pretty rare.
WoW's success is that it's got a very accessible learning curve. You don't sit down in front of the game and immediately spend 10 hours grinding rats to go up 1 level.
In fact, their most recent content (and general direction) has been towards a FUN game, with fewer idiotic time-waste grinds. Sadly, there are people who bitch that this makes it "casual", calling themselves "hardcore" in the sense that means "have way too much free time".
Blizzard has put in a lot of end-game time-waste grinds to try to keep the infinite-time basement-dwellers occupied too. But they know the numbers, and have 0 interest (rightly so) in making content that only 1-2% of their userbase will ever see.
This has driven the approach in the latest expansion that the "easy" version of all end-game raids can be done with a 10-man group, with much harder versions of the same encounters that give better loot for the people who like spending 8 hours wiping on the same boss over and over again.
I've always found raids (10 or 25+ person groups) to be a huge waste of time and not much fun. Maybe I haven't found the right guild, or more likely, my schedule (wanting to have dinner with my wife, having a job to go to in the morning) isn't amenable to the 4-5 hour grinds that raids require.
"Hardcore raids" aren't the only end-game, and they're not even the real "hardcore" part of the game. They're the part of the game targeted at the people with the most time to waste, while the best and most dedicated players are theorycrafters and top arena PVPers.
Some of whom also have 4+ hour blocks of time to sit around in a raid waiting for 1 guy to get back from tacobell cause he had the munchies.
Re:Wait, what?! (Score:5, Interesting)
Most people who take heroin never get addicted, and those who do would probably get hooked on something else if heroin wasn't around. That doesn't make heroin a "light" drug.
Re:Wait, what?! (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly. I knew a Very Smart guy who has a full scholarship to engineering school. Dropped/failed out due to playing everquest and not showing up for exams.
But before that, in high school, he would memorize D&D books, and sit in front of anime all the time. He could tell you the HP of every creature in the Monster Manual, but got caught cheating by saving physics formulas in his calculator.
Non-chemical addiction is often a personal problem, not a problem with the entertainment they spend all their time with.
You have to know what "casual" and "hardcore" mean (Score:3, Interesting)
...the article author doesn't.
The resurgence of casual gaming is indelibly tied to the new wave of game peripherals. From chick-friendly sing-alongs to the genre-crossing Guitar Hero,
Sorry guy. Guitar Hero has never been casual. If by "casual" you mean a game that you can play casually for a few minutes/hours here and there and have fun, then basically every decent video game ever made qualifies. There is absolutely nothing casual about truly 'beating' Guitar Hero. Just ask the players who got a legit 5-star performance of Through the Fire and Flames on expert.
A truly casual game is one with no real incentive to ever play more than a few minutes at a time. The Klondike Solitaire that comes with Windows would be a perfect example. The instant the game includes some kind of reward/incentive that requires you to invest significant time blocks or lots of practice it is no longer casual. Now sure, it can still be played casually, but then so can every good video game under the sun. You just have to avoid the non-casual parts.
Re:Where there's a will... (Score:2, Interesting)
like the guy who had a L80 Death Knight the FIRST DAY they released Wrath of the Lich King.
I'd like to see a citation for that. Server first level 80 on my server was a shaman, and from what I understand he didn't sleep for more than 48 hours to manage it (and he was starting from 70, with high end level 70 epics, not 55 with the semi-decent stuff they give new DKs). I don't think you could physically gather XPs fast enough to hit 80 from 55 in 24 hours.
At any rate, they've definitely made WoW more accessible to casual players. I did a few level 70 heroics and had a few nice Epics at the end of Burning Crusades, and I'd never even done Kara. Now, not even 6 months on in Lich King, the same character has cleared all the initial release raids at least once, and is fully geared in level 80 epics. I'm a fairly causal player. Very occasionally I'll play 20 hours a week, but usually it's closer to 10 and sometimes less than that. Even as a casual gamer, I kinda think they have have gone overboard in making things "accessible" this time around.
Re:Where there's a will... (Score:2, Interesting)
He may be making assumptions, but this is fairly accurate from what Blizzard themselves has commented on. A few months after the latest expansion, Ghostcrawler commented that something like only 60% had a max level character. Keep in mind that the insane race led to one person having a level 80 two days after release. The percentage that never enter an endgame dungeon is well below 50%, but it's still more than you would think (that's off the top of my head, I don't have any citation for that)
Hardcore is of course a relative term. There are people who completely obsess about every aspect of the game, and raid continuously. There are however also a lot of "casual" people who never really raid but spend a significant amount of time in the game doing other things. Or sometimes nothing at all. I've met a few soccer moms who basically use it as an amusing chat room. They watch their kids and you hardly ever get a reply from them within 10 minutes because they're almost always AFK (away from keyboard), but they're on for a significant amount of time.
World of Warcraft isn't really taylored to anyone anymore. There's a LOT of things to do whether you raid or not. Achievements in particular moved in this direction.
Re:Where there's a will... (Score:1, Interesting)
Hardcore gamers will never disappear, and companies that are looking to make millions upon billions of dollars probably won't serve them, but companies that recognize the potential and have talent and a passion for gaming will still serve it.
To put it another way, Computers used to only be of interest to mathematicians, accountants, and engineers and other "hard-core" types. Autodesk, Solidworks, Maplesoft, etc didn't just give up on the scientific software industry just because of the massive growth of "casual" computer users that only want e-mail, Facebook, and Amazon.
Re:Where there's a will... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Where there's a will... (Score:3, Interesting)
From my own experience, I'd say that part of this trend (that is, the increase in casual gamers, not a decrease in hardcore gamers) is from the Nintendo Generation growing up, getting jobs, married, families, etc.
I used to be a hardcore gamer. Video games were my life. They filled most of my non-school hours. But nowadays, I just don't have the time. This is partially because I've chosen to use my time in other ways (spending time with the wife) and partially because I have more of my time taken up making a living (I work much more of my time than I devoted to schooling.) Casual gaming helps me get my gaming fix without requiring that I devote hours per day to it.
If anything, though, it's Flash games that have taken over for me, not the Wii. We do own a Wii, but it doesn't get nearly as much play as tower defense Flash games (or what I like to call, RTS-lite.)
Re:Wait, what?! (Score:5, Interesting)
My biggest problem with WOW are the gratuitous time sinks Blizz has built into it. Quest chains where you have to travel across the continent just to talk to someone that suck up 10 or so minutes, action bars that are just there to burn time (e.g. fishing), painfully slow reputation grinds that aren't a challenge skillwise just matters of endurance, etc. You can spend many evenings in raids and walk out of them all empty handed simply because of a random number generator.
It's saving grace is that they do have an emblem system to toss folks a bone if they try many runs and are still getting shortchanged. The quests are also relatively simple to solo most of the time so you don't have to stand around begging for help. There are also some pretty inventive and fun quests and instances that keep the game fun.
Re:My first gaming experience. (Score:1, Interesting)
Except Mario Galaxy isn't as accessible as SMB, Wii Play feels like a cheap cop-out compared to Duck Hunt, and Metroid Prime 3 is a pretty, but unplayable, game and Metroid wasn't.
I played SMB when I was a kid. I finished it. I finished it without warps. I finished it eleventy hojillion times in a single day. Then I was tired of it. Sure, I was younger and not as "skilled" and it took me months to get to that point. But I can still pick SMB up and play it and enjoy it today, not because of any particular nostalgic memory, but because it's a good game. Now, when I play, I *will* get tired of the game rather quickly, just because I've been there and done that and it's not a new experience for me anymore.
Mario Galaxy, however, was old and tired and worn out when I first put the disk in my Wii. It was SMB. I've played SMB. Oh, but it was 3D, and therefore it was SM64. I've played SM64 probably as much as SMB. And Mario Galaxy wasn't substantially different. Sure, there was a new backdrop. There was the tiny amount of novelty of collecting stars. There was the walk-on-impossibly-small-planetoids-that-somehow-have-more-gravity-than-Mario's-fat-ass mechanic. Heck, I sexually stimulated a bee by walking on her. But it's still just SMB. I quit playing after a couple of hours and haven't played it in months.
Duck Hunt was always a bit of a novelty piece. The only reason anyone remembers it is because it was "the other game" that was packed in with SMB, and you paid an extra $20 for that nearly-useless light gun pack-in. So you shot some ducks. You missed some ducks. You got laughed at by that damn dog. You shot the dog and wasted your ammo. Then you got a Game Over. Stupid dog, why can't he just die? Then you got sick of that and shot some clay pidgeons. Then you got bored and went back to trying to beat 7-4 in SMB (assuming you could get there).
Wii Play is nearly identical. I bought it for the "free" Wiimote. I played it for about an hour. That means I got exactly as much play time from it as from Duck Hunt.
Metroid was awesome - a sidescrolling masterpiece, a fun exporation adventure, and had a good plot, even if it was a bit minimalist in its presentation. Metroid II and Super Metroid continued this tradition and expanded on it. All in all, it's one of the best series out there, and ranks up there with Zelda in my favorites list.
Metroid Prime was the beginning of the end, though. MP2:E and MP3:C are just extensions of that poor attempt at making a "modern" Metroid game. The first-person view didn't show enough detail or allow for enough control. "But it's not an FPS!" you say. To which I respond, "Yes it is." You see things in first-person view, and you shoot them. "First person" + "shooter" = "FPS". Sometimes you shoot them with a gun, or missiles, or an x-ray beam, or even with your scanner thingy. But you still target things and do something to them by pressing a button when they're targeted. It's a first-person shooter. But then you have to jump. Jumping is something FPS's are bad at. Then you duck and roll around. Ducking and rolling is something FPS's are bad at (which is why MP uses 3rd person view for this function). And then there's the poor control scheme. There was one and only one gamepad that was capable of being used for FPS games - the N64's controller. It had an analog looking input and a set of digital moving buttons. Basically, it had a mouse and WASD. And a couple more buttons for shooting, status, weapon-switch, etc. Barring the use of that decent setup, the only other acceptable way to control an FPS is keyboard/mouse. Nothing else will suffice. Therefore, until MP and its sequels are playable on a system that can use keyboard/mouse or the N64 controller, it is unplayable.
If Nintendo were good at making good games, they'd acknowledge and fix these issues. They're good at making games with fewer flaws than the competition. Nothing more.
Oh, and all of this comes from a self-admitted Nintendo fanboy. I have one of each Nintendo system, and they all still work. I refuse to buy other consoles, mostly on principle. Though I did make an exception for the PSX due to Final Fantasy 7/8/9.