Rune Factory: Tides of Destiny - Fishing Poles, Scarves and Monster Slavery

What exactly is rune factory? Well the creator basically called it, "Harvest Moon with a sword." Its basically Harvest Moon meets action RPG. Its highly praised and many people have suggested the game to me. I haven't played any of the other rune factories but everyone seems to enjoy the game a lot so I picked one on the Wii rather than the handheld. Was it a bad choice? I heard the hand held versions are superior however I didn't find the game horrifyingly bad except for some really terrible decisions.

You first start off the game with you going around beating up random monsters then suddenly a bright light appears while you're in town with your BFF. Suddenly you're sucked 200 years into the future and shes now stuck inside your body. You play as both people and she can take control of your body and talk with others. Its really bizzare but you'll get used to the weirdness, as will the rest of the people in the future town. Like all other harvest moon games you go around farming and planting stuff and selling for money. Theres one difference in this game in that farming is secondary. It felt tacked on and you don't even get to farm it yourself. You can capture monsters by scrubbing them with a brush then force them to work on your farm. You cannot grow plants by yourself, you need a monster to grow it for you. All you can do is place a marker on the ground where a monster will come and then stomp the ground and then the marker will bloom. You feed your monster slaves monster cookies everyday. Each monster eats one a day. The bad part about this? You never get to choose what you want to plant. You really want a Pom Pom Flower for that hat? Too bad. You need a strawberry for some jam or a quest? Pray your monsters plant them. If you forget to feed your monsters its fine they won't starve to death or anything they'll just become unable to work. I also want to point out that you can choose to kill your monsters. In the game quests will often tell you to "return the monster to the forest of beginnings" by killing them or NPCs will talk about sending the monsters back there by slashing it to death with a sword. By talking to your monster slaves at your farm you can pick an option to "return the monster to the forest of beginnings." If you select that option they will die and their spirit will float away.

The main focus about this game however is the combat. You can pick from a variety of weapons and poke, stab, slash, smack, and smash your way to victory. Combat for the most part is fairly responsive and fluid. However, using skills requires a huge cast time and will lock you in animation. Some weapons are also very slow that basically gets you stunlocked from 100% to 0% when surrounded. Every monster hit will stagger you no matter the damage. Even if its a 100 hits doing 5 damage a hit you will get staggered and basically just go grab a drink because you'll be stuck getting hit for the next 5 minutes until you die. This only becomes a problem near the end of the game when they start throwing in large masses of enemies with projectiles. The game itself doesn't have many dungeons. In fact there are four dungeons total in the whole game and 5 bosses. These dungeons are super spread out and you must get there by walking on your golem through the sea. You might be thinking this game must be really short. Yes it is short, but they pad it with the most stupid shit ever.

You do not buy gear in this game. Nothing in the store is useful except to buy materials to craft your own stuff. Crafting starts off alright, collect some materials, make the item, then kick some monster butt. Sounds simple. Then suddenly BAM you hit a wall. You need to raise your crafting skill to craft the new stuff. If you don't craft these you are stuck in progression because you cannot fight against the new stronger monsters. So what do you do? You grind. You sit down and you grind the fucking thing. You make millions of scarves and fishing poles. I am not fucking joking. You will sit down and waste at least two hours of your life spamming the craft button until you are bored out of your mind. Now that you got that out of your way its time to spend a few hours farming rare drops from monsters until you get it. I wouldn't mind if the crafting was optional. If it gave you stronger items or super powerful items. Like have the shops sell some decent gear when you reach the next dungeon, with crafting letting you create stronger ones than the ones in the shop. But no they force people to craft these. Also to get crafting recipes, you first have to make friends with the villagers. By completing quests and raising friendship they will give you recipes. So it takes even longer.

The worst part in all of this? Like harvest moon games, there is a stamina meter. In this game its called RP or Rune Power. Everything you do uses rune power. Crafting, fighting, planting, etc. If you run out of RP it will start draining your health until you die. If you are fighting monsters and you run out of RP then you're shit out of luck. To bypass this you need to buy a shit load of food to eat. Food will recover some RP and you're basically crafting, eating, crafting, eating, crafting, eating every day. In dungeons you will be killing, then eating, kill, eat, kill, eat, kill, eat, kill, eat. This might sound tedious, and it is. The worst part is how much money you'll be draining on food. You cannot possibly afford that at the start so you'll be spending days fighting a couple of monsters and going back to sleep. Is there a reason why RP is so intrusive? You can easily drain your entire RP pool killing one to two enemies with a weak weapon. Thats fucking bullshit. If this game wants to play like an action RPG then don't add something like this. If they want it to be a farming simulator, then let us plant our own fucking plants instead of making us create fishing poles and scarves for fucking hours.

Last and not least the villagers are the craziest people you'll ever meet. Father Gerad, a priest, is probably the worst depiction of a homosexual person I have ever seen. The villagers describe him as a character and he's over the top flamboyant. Then you have the most boring people like Seirra who never wants to man the fucking shop so you have to wait around all day for her to walk inside rather than standing at the door. You cannot buy stuff unless shes indoors. Her whole existence is to complain about work, to avoid work, and to piss off her twin brother off. The brother isn't much better either, he is super shy and can't talk to girls. Then you have people who drug you because she loves you, and people who is in love with their little sister. Basically crazy people and you're stuck with them. The game lets you play as a male or female but only at the very end after you beat the game. When you split apart from the same body you can choose to play as yourself or as your BFF. However, playing as a female is an afterthought. The entire game you are playing as Aden, the guy.

There are 9 bachelorettes and 3 bachelors. That number itself is indicative of how much effort they put into making the female counterpart of the main character. Basically the list of characters are:

Bachelorettes
Odette - The normal girl who loves to cook and works at the inn. The first person you meet.
Lily - The older sister of Odette. She is incredibly clumsy and ditzy and often falls face first on the floor.
Violet - Younger sister of Odette. She is incredibly shy and softspoken. She falls in love with you at first sight and drugs you.
Electra - Mayor's daughter who really likes housework and being a housewife *groan*
Maerwen - A dark elf. A token dark skin character. She works as a maid for Electra. She acts really cold and has a sharp tongue but is really nice underneath it all.
Sierra - The tomboy active girl who hates work and complains about it everyday and is the most boring and annoying character in the game.
Mikoto - The token asian character in every single harvest moon/rune factory game for the xenophobes that play the game. Shes a cross dressing samurai.
Pandora - The evil sorcresses out for world domination. She calls you her minion and bosses you around all day long.
Elena - A golem crazy inventor/blacksmith/childish person who sleeps until 4pm every day.

Bachelors
Bismark - Sierra's super serious and super shy girl fearing twin brother.
James - Elena's older brother who has a girlfriend already and who cannot stop talking about "his cute little sister" because "her cute face lets him get through the day." Incest alert.
Joe - A giant idiot surfer dude. So very stupid.

So as you can see, girls get the short end of the stick with three of the most depressing people you can ever find. Guys at least have more choice although most of them are terrible. However, all this only appears after you beat the main game. You cannot raise friendship of NPCs over 6 until you beat the game.

The game started off fine at the start, fun in fact, then it became one of the most tedious grinds I ever seen in a game. And I grinded a lot in Disgaea. The difference is, it was somewhat enjoyable there, and for this game its just crafting fishing poles and eating ice cream cones until you take a break from boredom. The farming element is an afterthought in the game and do not expect to spend much time farming. Except to spend in game days just traveling from one place to another and many in game days trying to clear a little bit further in the dungeon because of your limited RP. Although its much easier to just run past all the enemies because it wastes too much RP to fight them. Only fight them when you need drops after that just keep running to the end and buy a stack of food and fight the boss while downing as much food as you can to keep your RP up. Other than these giant flaws, the game itself feels like harvest moon. The combat is fun when you have enough RP to fight. Its decent but not good enough.

Muramasa: The Demon Blade Finale - Biggest waste of fucking time

This is a continuation of my previous part found here.

So you beat the game and you found the endings unacceptable. You want to know what the fuck happened and don't wanna end with those pitiful excuses for endings. There are four more endings. The true endings for either characters. And two alternate secret endings. For example in Momohime's ending Kongiku was punished for helping Junkuro and turned back into a normal fox and Junkuro died and sacrificed himself to save Momohime. Then Momohime wakes up with no memory and lives with an elderly couple until Oni's come and attack and she fucked them over with her Oboro style. She goes "what is this scary power" and goes around searching for the answer with Kongiku who is a normal fox. The end. WHAT THE FUCK. For Kisuke's ending you randomly meet Momohime out of nowhere and kill Junkuro's spirit and saves her. Then Torahime is like do me one last favor before I die and makes Kisuke Momohime's servant because Kisuke is madly in love with Torahime. Then Momohime goes "Lets go around and collect all the Muramasas!" The end.

You're thinking "Ok maybe the super secret super ending is better!" Nope! Its in fact worse. Worse than you can possibly imagine. First of all to get the ending you must first, beat the game with both characters. Then you must beat the White Monster Lairs which are only available after you beat the game with both characters. In here you fight series of challenges. You are rewarded with secret swords. Then you must equip two very specific swords and go fight the last boss with your two characters. Here you will find your true ending. Then after beating both you must get to maximum level wear the best sword in the game and fight again for the alternate ending. You must be going this is a lot of work. MORE THAN YOU CAN IMAGINE.

How would you like a game where you have to grind over and over again to reach the maximum level just so you can have a real ending. Because the regular endings go "this is not the end..." and tease you while giving you no fucking conclusion. To level you go fight challenge bosses. Theres one boss who is the easiest boss in the game but gives 12x the exp of every single boss in the game combined. So what you do is endlessly fight this guy until you level. Kill, save repeat. Kill, save repeat. I have to ask. Why do you need to level up to equip a sword? What is the point. If I got it just let me use it. The problem is, even after equipping it, it does nothing to help. Everything in the game scales to your level. A shitty ass boss does 7k damage a hit. What in the fuck is that? I thought the boss is level 35. How the fuck he do 95% of my health in a single hit when I'm max level.

Then you have fucking retarded pointless random encounters. I never pointed this out before but I'll point it out now because of how tedious it became when I realized how much running around there are. For example, Momohime's final dungeon will take at least five minutes to walk from beginning to the end without anything in your way. With random encounters this goes up to like an hour. Not exactly but it sure feels like it. Every four steps you take you fight enemies. I got a item from a challenge boss which says "greatly reduces random encounters." That item is a lie. Instead of fighting every four steps, you fight every six steps. Hardly any help. I did not notice any fucking difference with or without the item. You cannot run from combat either and while shit scales with your level you can't blow through them all instantly and move on. You're forced to fight and fight and fight. Why bother when you're max level? Nothing. You already wasted an hour grinding the boss so you can wear your fucking sword now you have to waste another hour walking to the last boss again.

So there I am pissed as fucking hell reach the final boss again make sure I have the final sword equipped, fight the guy. Notice he's scaled to fucking hell, beat his face in easily and then wait for the alternate ending. ONLY TO FIND OUT ITS A PIECE OF SHIT. Instead of Junkuro being killed by Fudoo-Mudoo, Buddha's bodyguard, you managed to kill him with your sword. Now you go back in time. You're Junkuro in human form and you see Momohime and her fiancée running from the castle that should have killed her. Instead of killing her and taking over her body like you did before. You let her go and walk away. Then you go into the future where its Momohime getting married with her fiancee and its hinted that Junkuro has taken over his body and is marrying you instead but since you went back in time Momohime never knew about Junkuro. Then the ending goes "It is said Momohime given birth three times and lived to be over 100. You have reached the end of The Pandemonium of the Oboro Sword."

WHAT IN THE FUCKING SHIT. I fucking did all that and this was what I got? WHY THE FUCK WOULD THEY THINK THIS WOULD SATISFY ANYONE. First of all. Junkuro is like 60 years old and Momohime is 12. Fucking her finacee is like 35 years old. The worst part is that if I want to see Kisuke's alternate ending which would probably be just as fucking shitty, I would have to do all this again. But why would I? I would rather fucking play HoN, LoL, and DotA at the same time with 4 feeders on my team in each game while playing Persona 3 and 4 on the TVs while blasting Friday by Rebecca Black on repeat and having my dick sawed off by a chainsaw while cutting my stomach open with a knife. That is less painful that fucking playing this game again.

DO NOT PLAY THIS GAME.

EVER.

Save yourself from the years of nightmare and torture you get from playing this game.

Muramasa: The Demon Blade Part 2 - More filler content than actual gameplay

This is a continuation of my previous one found here.

Now that I went back and finished Kisuke's route, the only thing I can say is what the fuck. At first I thought Kisuke's story would be related to Momohime's story but no. These two are completely irrelevant. They don't cross over except you see them in hot springs and say one word to each other. A lot of games do the finish the game with two or more characters to have the full story shit. I always hated those. You are already attached to your first character. Why do I have to beat the game again to see the full story? Why not have multiple paths and endings so we can discuss with others and see what we got differently? Instead we get one confusing half of a story with no ending and no fucking answers. Until you play the other half you're in the dark. When you play the other character you notice that he or she is a giant dipshit and you don't feel like playing it again.

For example something like Mana Khemia 2 where you have to pick between the slave guy or the country bumpkin. I started off with the slave and you are forced into school by this girl who is your master and she literally drags you around everywhere. You reluctantly do whatever she says because hey she owns your life. Basically the whole half of the game is how you hate Manas and how she has a crush on you but you are oblivious as all fuck. If you play the country bumpkin you are this dipshit chick who is a giant airhead and pisses you off every opportunity she gets. Her story is about raising a Mana egg. The stories cross over a lot as both  of these teams are rivals at school and you often fight against or with each other. Their team often joins your party as a guest and you are often helping the other team in quests or stuff. Thats alright. I get the majority of the story and each team has their own individual storyline.

Something similar but a little different is Arc the Lad where you play the story of two brother separated at birth. You have to play both of them at the same time as the storyline switches between them from chapter to chapter. One goes from one side of the world the other goes from the other. They never meet and just barely miss each other. One person is fighting for the monsters one person is fighting for the humans and they all hate each other. Until finally at the climax you both meet for the first time and then find out whose behind all that shit and team up brother with brother and fuck them up. That game had a nice story and combat was fun as heck.

But I'm getting carried away from the main point. Muramasa is neither of those. Its two confusing halves of two confusing stories with no ending no climax no character development. Hell the fucking filler content is more than the actual gameplay. You spend more time walking to the next location than actual storyline or boss fights. I finished Kisuke's route in a little over three hours. THREE FUCKING HOURS. And funny part is, over 75% of the game was walking from one side of the world to the other. The storyline is pathetically short. You must be asking, how do you develop characters in an RPG in three hours? The answer is you don't.

I liked Momohime's route a lot more than Kisuke's mainly because Momohime is always travelling with Junkuro who taken over her body and using it to kill gods and demons. Then theres the foxgirl Kongiku the servant of Junkuro and her fox friends who faithfully does everything Junkuro says. Basically her story is Junkuro is out to find the evil sword to gain unlimited power and fuck the world. You actually get travel companions with you and actual dialogue. Kisuke's route is you are this dipshit ninja who lost his memory. How cliche. You're this loner who travels around trying to find your memory and beating up the wrong people like a retard because you're being tricked. Following you is the foxgirl Yuzuruha who tells you that her master sent her over to help you by giving you swords to collect souls of the slain and forge demon blades. Yuzuruha is way better than Kongiku. First of all Yuzuruha doesn't talk like a dumbass, have breasts exploding out her clothes, and doesn't refer to you as master. She does do the little spin-around thing while holding her paper umbrella which is a little distracting but its forgivable. She doesn't really help you or do anything to aid you really. Shes hardly even in the story and only appears to say something then disappear. Kisuke is always and forever alone.

Kisuke's story is mainly about Torahime, Momohime's elder sister who died and was resurrected for 49 days. In those 49 days she's looking for revenge for the death of her entire family and clan. What I found retarded is Torahime is related to Momohime and Kisuke is related to Junkuro yet neither of their stories overlap at all. You would think its perfect to come together eventually but no. Its just two stories doing their own shit. The worst part is it still gives you half a story. So in total you get a quarter of the game in each route. Fuck this game.

One thing I have to point out is this game lets you forge a ton of swords. These names are all impossible to remember you just have to look at the stats. Each sword has a different secret art, basically skills unique to that sword. They also have a special stat such as +1 strength, +10% more damage to all swords, 50% fire resistance. Then theres the attack power of the sword itself. As cool as that sound, most swords you get and use for less than five minutes before you toss them for a better one. You might consider keeping one for their stats or secret art but no you rarely ever need to use them. Normal random mobs are too easy to need it. You might use it once or twice to wipe them out fast but your normal hits can kill them just as fast. For bosses you don't use the secret arts because you need to keep your sword power to block attacks. You can carry three swords with you at a time and you can switch at anytime during combat. Each sword has its individual health bar which is drained by blocking or from using their secret arts. Once a sword breaks your damage is neutered and you cannot block. When you sheathe a sword, it will slowly recover their health. A broken sword needs to wait until it gets full health before its fixed. Therefor the only reason you get a sword is for their attack power. Then you slash the boss until it breaks and switch to another.

Another thing is cooking. I pointed out how slow and tedious it is to make food. But there are actually two types of food. One type of food is shit that you can carry like rice balls you can make out of a pot and then gently knead it in your hands, baked potato by cooking yams under leaves, and grilled squid by sticking a fucking squid into the fire. These take forever to make but are cheap easy healing when needed. You can carry them with you into battle. The other type are hotpots. You cook them but you have to eat them right away. These are pure shit. You cannot cook in combat so the only reason to use them is if you are low on health from random mobs and you wanna heal up. They are also expensive a shit to make so you're better off eating a squid or something. However unlike the other type of food, hotpots always gives buffs. These buffs only last like 30 seconds so if you use it then fight a boss it wears off by the time it actually starts. Using it to clear random mobs are pointless because how easy they are. So what are the use of these? Nothing. Just for the food porn where you watch it get eaten away bite by tiny bite and comments on how good it taste. Fuck just go to a restaurant instead. At least you get to taste it.

Most good games you don't want the story to end yet, while shitty games you can't wait for it to actually end. For this game I'm torn between the two. I want the game to end but since theres no story or real ending I want it to keep going so it can actually give me something. I think even Blade Kitten has more story and depth to the game than this. You should just think of this game as a side scrolling action platformer than an RPG. The combat is fun. Yes its easy but its fun. Some people may find it a bit difficult but I was around 9-18 levels below the recommended levels the entire game and I managed to beat it fine. I was like level 23 by the time I finished the game on Kisuke's route. I couldn't even use half the swords I got from bosses because I was so underleveled. Funny thing is this is supposed to be the "hard mode." The real hard mode is unlocked by beating a game on either character.

There was some confusion from what I said before. When you start a new save, you automatically have two saves on your one save. One is Momohime's one is Kisuke's. By selecting your save you are able to pick between the two. The time spent and swords collected in either save gets totalled into your main save. If you wish to play the hardest mode you must start over after you beaten either Momohime or Kisuke. That is complete bullshit. Why fucking tease us with a mode we will never play. Should just enable it so on your second playthrough you can feel challenged. And after beating the game on both characters you can finally unlock the blocked monster lairs. All fucking three of them. In there you fight the same bosses as you fought in the main game but this time you fight more than one at a time! Gasp! Fucking too lazy to make real content and have to resort to repeating content into filler content. This game is pathetic and I take back anything good I said about it in part one of my review.

One last thing about this game before I'm done. When you play this game you'll learn that all Japanese women can't or refuse to fight and will whine at every opportunity they get. Seriously when you first meet Torahime you tell her that a woman wearing armor and going off into battle is stupid and should stay home. Then you kick her ass. Momohime cannot fight and will whine at every opportunity. In Momohime's route you fight a thunder god which you would think would be powerful as fuck but no. You just smack her then she falls down from the sky and reveals her ass and you have to spank her while she moans for maximum damage. Then she loses and the other lightning god is like stop being stupid or I'll stop liking you and she's all like what thats mean waaaah whineee whineeee. Fucking horrible portrayal of women in this game. Then again this is Vanillaware, known for their extreme sexism.

Muramasa: The Demon Blade Part 1 - Food porn and hot springs galore

Muramasa is a Vanillaware game. Its not bad, the combat is fun but like all Vanillaware games there are huge flaws. The first and biggest flaw is that there is basically no story. You start in the middle of nowhere where stuff has already happened and theres no conclusion at all. This game is similar to Odin Sphere but the combat is greatly improved. The story however is much weaker. There are two characters you can play as, Momohime or Kisuke, and it takes place in the feudal Japan era. It has so much potential but they blew it.

Like other Vanillaware games, the graphics are great. Since this one is on the Wii its much better than the PS2 titles. Character designs are decently done, some are a little stupid like Momohime is basically running around with no pants and the fox girl Kongiku on Momohime's path has breasts almost bursting out of her clothes. The background is nicely done but there is a minor flaw. Sometimes you can't tell what is in the background and what is in the foreground. Sometimes you're not really sure what you can step on and what you can't. For a platforming game this can be annoying. But the maps almost all use the same background for laziness so once you see it once you won't get that problem again.

Combat is amazingly fun. Its fluid and its fast paced. Its a side scrolling brawler with a variety of combos and special skills based on the sword you picked. There is a normal blade which is fast and the combos are usually fast mini hits. The long blade is slower but it does multiple mini hits in a single swing. The long blade has a bug however that I abused a bit. If you jump in the air and use a long sword combo you have this gravitational pull when you hit something that pulls them towards you even if the enemy is in the air behind you. When you do this they cannot perform any action and with a long blade you can chain about 4-5 combos in the air before you finally reach the ground. Doing so on enemies that can leap in the air can combo upwards to 200-300 hits and kill them before you reach the ground.

However fun the combat is the difficulty is incredibly easy. Most monsters you can just spam your A button and kill them all. Monster lairs and Bosses provide a bit of a challenge but they are not that difficult either. When you first start a game it it lets you pick between two difficulties, Muso for people who suck horribly at gaming, or Shura the normal mode for average players. Once you beat either story once on Shura mode Shigurui mode is enabled. HOWEVER! You must start a brand new game instead of starting on new game+ which is continuing your story with the second character. The game lets you play either character at either time. You can play them both at once or finish one first. It is entirely up to you. Note that both characters can use swords unlocked by either character so its beneficial to play both at once. You may not have the amount of souls needed though. This game also pulls the same bullshit as other Vanillaware games though. To get the second ending of either character you must first complete both character's first ending and equip a secret sword you get after getting both of the first endings then beating the respective final bosses. To get the true ending you must equip the secret sword after getting both secondary endings then beating the respective final bosses. A pain in the fucking ass.

The characters are entertaining and you really want to get to know them a bit better but it never really expands on it. Momohime's route you're a princess whose spirit was forced out of her own body by a criminal called Junkuro. Who is he? What is he trying to acomplish? Nothing really is explained. All you know is he knows the Obouro style sword fighting. To keep it for himself he killed his master and all the other disciples. He's a badass who takes no shit from no one and travels to hell and heaven to get a sword back. Along the way you hear Momohime whine at every possible stop about how evil he is being. You get a few sentences of what happened such as Momohime's family being killed and overthrown, some guy who appears for like 2 minutes and gets his ass kicked by Junkuro, random monk who tries so hard to punish Junkuro and then gets a epiphany at the end of the game and turns "good" and travels around the land with Momohime following him because of Junkuro's fucking sacrifice to save Momohime.

The story is short. I finished Momohime's route in a little over 6 hours. Thats pathetically short especially with me dicking around in monster lairs, hot springs, and engaging in food porn every chance I got. I also left the game on for long periods of time while I did other shit. Theres more hidden content after you beat both stories but still. Another thing in this game is the hot springs. How fucking common are hot springs in Japan? Every 10 maps you see a new hot spring and even after beating a boss you all get into the hot spring together. You see a barely naked Momohime walking around. She looks like shes 12 for fucks sake. Its a free heal and sometimes you get to talk to people. Then theres the food porn. You can go into restaurants and order food and it will be placed on the table in front of you. You have to click A repeatedly to eat the item. It eats it bite by bite and Momohime will keep commenting on how nice the food is, etc etc. Cooking isn't much different. Sometimes I wanna bake a bunch of potatoes for the boss and its taking fucking forever because you have to dig a hole place the potato in the hole and cover it with leaves then set it on fire then pull it out. FOR EACH INDIVIDUAL POTATO. There no auto cook, you have to keep hitting the A button. It was cool seeing it for the first time but seeing it time after time is tedious.

This is it for now.

Gii-mmicks.

This is another article I had unfinished for a long time. Originally intended for publishing in early January, 2010.

About a month ago, I had the opportunity to try out the latest Wii gimmick, the Wii Motion Plus and its associated bundled tech-demo game, Wii Sports Resort on my friend's home console.

Now, before I start off, I have to mention that I've always been pretty negative about the Wii, and I'm sure glad as hell I never purchased one. It was and still clearly is, a casual gamer console that catered to the family audience, and its weak library of games relied far too heavily on the gimmicky aspect of their control scheme to ascend their games to the forefronts of publishing.

Regardless, the addition of a new motion sensor has generally improved on the accuracy on the Wii-mote, but feels like a feature that a consumer would have justifiably expected as a standard with the release of the Wii. After all, isn't this the console that designed from the bottom up with the accuracy of Wii-mote gyroscopic movement, spatial location and fine angular changes in mind? Pushing out a product now that says "Oh hey, we didn't make it right the first time, here's a tack on upgrade" really seems to cheapen the design ideals of which the console is wholly based on.

Additionally, despite the improvement, it still doesn't feel like it does enough. You can still feel that the Wii has certain specific situations and movements that aren't being detected as well as other types. For example, thrusting or pulling motions seem to be poorly registered, often incorrectly recognizing a pulling movement when you thrust forward and vice versa.

More and more, the Wii feels like a console selling off a gimmick aspect, not all that much different from how Apple products sell nowadays. While new, unorthodox control schemes are interesting and add dynamic to gaming, I think the least frustrating designs have been those that ease in the incorporation of new control functionality without abandoning old ones. Essentially, the best designs that face the least amount of resistance are those that 'upgrade' the most practical controller design of the previous generation. The SNES controller was a sleeker, more powerful version of the NES one, and one of the best controllers at the time, leaving a legacy for even modern controllers to follow. The PS1 controller too was upgraded with analog sticks and pressure-sensitive button functionality, becoming the PS2 controller. Yet the directional pad was not abandoned, and at the choice of the user, continued to be the primary method of control for many games.

One of the issues inherent with Nintendo is that they have always been trying to innovate in the most bizarre methods. From Power Gloves, to Virtual Boys, to Pistols and Bazookas, Nintendo's Wii really doesn't seem to be the odd one out of the box, relatively speaking. However, because of this characteristic, I find that it's difficult to have balanced games designed for long term mastery or competitive play when it is based off such strange, unpredictable control schemes. We still have competitive iterations Mario or Street Fighter, which use traditional control schemes, but have you ever seen competitive Duck Hunt? Or Power Ball? Or Wii Tennis? The fact that it is impossible to make these games competitive stems from it's unreliable control schemes, and as such, no one cares to be competitive at them, as the element of luck or device-specific accuracy varies too greatly. This makes gimmick consoles unlikely to accomplish anything but create a 10 minute mass of flailing limbs.

Seeing other consoles or developers who backed traditional long-term games abandon their principles to jump on the gimmick market is a devastating shame. It is fine to have a few esoteric companies develop bizarre creations, but without the core companies sticking with the practical methods, gaming as a whole deteriorates as the long-term competitive games that we hold dear will dissipate, as more is instead invested to the 10 minute drivel that gimmick-developers churn out. Gimmicks are like poison, recreationally fine in small dosages but too much will kill off what makes true dedicated gaming great and memorable.