The Wii has many unique features available to game developers, but very few companies seem to be utilizing these amazing abilities. There are so many possibilities hiding within the Wii, but none of them are getting very much attention. Here are two of the Wii's greatest abilities that I am seeing used far too rarely in today's games.
SD card music
This is perhaps the most unbelievable of all of the Wii's underused capabilities. Not only did one of the console's launch titles (Excite Truck) feature custom music support, but developers had been allowing player-selected tunes for over a year on the Xbox 360! Thusly, it's nothing foreign to the game makers to implement custom tunes. Why isn't this happening more often? Excite Truck did it 10 months ago, for crying out loud! Come on, developers, make this a priority in your upcoming games! So many games can benefit from such technology! Need For Speed: Carbon and SSX Blur would have been even better with custom tunes! SD card music support is a great idea, and the lack of attention it's getting is insulting to it's brilliance.
Mii integration
One of the most well known things about the Wii are the cute little caricatures known as Miis. So far, Miis have been part of Wii Sports, Wii Play, Mario Strikers Charged and Wario Ware: Smooth Moves. Upcoming games utilizing the little dudes are Wii Music and Wii Fit. All of these games are by Nintendo! The only game announced so far using Miis that ISN'T made by Nintendo themselves is FIFA 08. A little sad, isn't it? Miis are a great idea, and it's a real shame to see them being used in so few titles. I really hope to see these guys in a lot more games by this time next year.
If we saw more Miis and SD music, playing Wii would be an even more beautiful thing. But, as it stands, developers look wary of adopting the Wii's special abilities (Beyond "waggle", of course). Which of the Wii's features do you most want to see in upcoming games?
2 comments:
Miis have also been featured in SEGA's Pachinko title in Japan, and in a couple of other titles as avatars, but you certainly have a point when you say they're not being used enough.
Another major feature I was surprised you didn't mention was WiiConnect24. That one has gone under-utilized even by Nintendo, as it doesn't automatically update or download anything as it was intended to in the beginning, and third-parties haven't really been using it at all. It'll be a damn shame if it isn't used too much in the future, although I expect that, over time, along with everything else, its uses will increase.
need more sd card music
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