Wiiiiiiiiiii

"Ouch"

The Wii is often met with criticism in the gaming industry, from the hardcore gamers to people in the industry, it's fair to say that the Wii's image in the public gaming eye is not that great. However despite that it retains a fairly respectable lead in sales, now why is that? To look at it, we must look from the viewpoint of a casual gamer. As you know, the wii has a fair amount of shovelware, games that are simple spunked up minigames, there are countless amounts of these buggers floating around, and despite the whole premise of these quick buck games, they're snatched up like hot pies.

The Reason? It's not the games themselves that attract these casual gamers, it's the novelty of a motion controlled gaming experience...nay...it's the innovative nature of the wii that keeps causal gamers playing as well as being a main interest in the gaming community when it was announced all those years ago. Despite how it's treated now with companies like Ubisoft giving a massive meh, The Wii is a revolutionary piece of kit, sure graphics wise it's nothing but a souped up gamecube but the idea of a motion controller was something that had only previously been a novelty, a passing trend (oh poor gametrac).

"We hardly knew thee...."

It successfully brought Motion controlled gaming to mainstream entertainment, and its impact is surely felt in the industry with Microsoft and Sony's latest ventures of Natal and Move (Move especially those cheeky gits) which aim to take the experience offered by the Wii to a next generation. Hopefully unlike the wii these ventures won't turn into a shovelware bonanza.

So all that's left to say is speculation on how it'll go from here. With kits like natal coming out, is the age of the simple controller passing on? Will it turn into something like eXistenZ with its full on Virtual Reality environment. Only time will tell.