Its been a while since I've written anything on the industry, too busy playing and reviewing games ontop of life. I still feel like documenting my opinion on this past E3, but that's not what this is about today. In recent news, Suda 51 in an interview with Edge Mag told them that No More Heroes: Desperate struggle will most likely be the last NMH title on Wii and that he wishes to continue to grow the franchise on another console. Reading the forums after this news, Nintendo fans are obviously pissed. He continues on saying that though he did enjoy developing the game for the Wii, he's done all that he could with it and the only way to let this franchise evolve is to move it to another platform. Though I am a Nintendo fan and ashamed to see Suda abandon the Wii, there are two sides to this shift. In this generation, we've seen plenty of movement with big name publishers including Square and Konami with Final Fantasy and Metal Gear to name a few. Though we as gamers enjoy playing their products, it needs to be understood that this is a business. The moves that these publishers make are in intent to make more revenue. However, Suda didnt expand on what exactly he ment by, "we've done everything we can with it now." Is he refering to technical limitations? If so, then Suda is severly misguided. The greatest downside to the first NMH was its lack of technical effort. It had some of the worst open world settings not only in this gen, but also last generation as well. The visuals were artistically stylized, but lacked graphical presentation. There's no excuse for this as other open-world games on Wii have achieved far better graphics then what was seen in NMH. Scarface for example was ported from last gen and still presented better polish. If Suda feels that NMH's colt style will appeal to PS3 and 360 owners better, then they better market it correctly. To the Hi-Def system owners, No More Heroes will seem like a new IP, and if NMH doesnt atleast stand out like it did on Wii, Suda's platform shift will be in vein.

Assuming that this change has something to do with the Wii's audience, as well has Suda's so called effert to grow the franchise, another shift caught my eye recently. GTA Chinatown Wars was annnouced that it'll be making its way to the PSP. Though Rockstar's Sam Houser mentioned nothing about the DS when it was reveald that Chinatown Wars was moving to the PSP; it's hard to believe that this had nothing to do with the game's shockingly low sales numbers after its release. Chinatown Wars had everything going for it: a popular brand name, agressive marketing, and high critical acclaim. This is everything a game needs to sell, and yet GTA's sales were not impressive in the least. The only factor that could explain this is that the DS market is still seen to be one for kids and casual players. With Suda 51 and Rockstar moving away from the Nintendo's platforms from what seems to be in order to chase a more responsive market, Nintendo needs to return to its original intent, games for everyone. Not games for mothers, daughters, grandparents and less experienced players, they need to include all of the above and the demographic that got them here in the first place. This last E3 hasnt proven that, as they spent most of their conference focusing on the casual market, and only brief snippits on core titles. It wasnt till coming close to the end of the conference that they dished out a series of games targeted towards the core market including their biggest surprise, Metroid: Other M. But other overal attitude of the conference was very casual.

Will Nintendo ever get it? It's hard to say. Both the Wii and the DS are far ahead of the competition. Looking at this from a present business standpoint, there isnt much need to break profit. However, Sony and Microsoft are starting to embrace Nintendo's strategy with Project Notal being the closest to release. At the rate that they're going, they may very well steal the market away from Nintendo. I'm afraid that once Nintendo realizes that they need to step up, it'll be too late.