Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [95]
It took years to get the controls right: for a while, any room with an incandescent bulb (or even a candle) would make the Wiimote act wonky. But once its bugs were squashed, the Wii offered not just a new interface but a new way of thinking about games, appealing to a vast audience who’d stayed away from consoles before this. There was consideration of releasing it as an accessory for the ailing Gamecube. But that system’s time was at an end. The current gaming market, to use another business-book analogy, was a red ocean, awash with blood and sharks. Nintendo had spent too many years being bitten by those sharks: time to take their more deserving Wii console into the blue ocean of an untapped market.
The Wii, though, was not exactly a more deserving console. It did do several things right: backward compatibility with Gamecube discs and controllers, standard-size twelve-centimeter optical discs, 512 MB of internal flash memory. The Wii’s expansion storage uses standard SD memory cards, the breath-strip-size flash cards found in digital cameras, and the Wiimotes have storage space as well. But what was going to sell the Wii was the presentation. When the game started up, players were shown the Wii menu, with a choice of screens to click on. There was whatever game was inserted. There was a News Channel—those hooked up to the Internet could see headlines, local weather, and sports. Wanna get online? You can.
The Wii menu was strongly influenced by Apple, beyond its soothing white color scheme. Apple’s MP3 players were very expensive, and hampered with digital rights issues. But they saw huge popularity thanks to an intuitive, simple interface: a click-wheel, a minimum of confusing buttons, a system that automatically finds each album’s cover art for you. Nintendo would do the same, and offer it at bargain prices. Take that, Steve Jobs.
The iStore equivalent, the place where people could painlessly browse and buy great tracks they never knew they needed, was the Wii Shop Channel. It sold older games playable on emulators of the NES, SNES, and even the Nintendo 64. Mario Bros. was a Wii Store launch game, and Mario fare both well known and obscure soon followed—from Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros. to Mario’s Super Picross. The Wii Shop offered WiiWare, original games not sold in stores, such as Dr. Mario Online Rx and Dr. Mario Express for the Wii and DS, and WarioWare: Snapped! for the DS. All of these were managed by Wii Points, digital tokens equivalent to a penny. Most NES games cost five bucks.
Nintendo was in no way unique at this point in selling downloadable content for its console, despite pioneering it decades ago. Xbox Live’s menu gave gamers a richer online experience than the Wii did. And the PS3’s PlayStation Network offered downloads of older hits, too. One true standout of the Wii Menu, though, was the Mii Channel. Clicking on it brought the user to a face-creation program, intuitively designed with an emphasis on eyebrows. There are strange omissions—no red hair? No dark skin tones? No body customizations other than height and width? But most any face can be created with a shocking degree of accuracy. (A regular contest for Wii users gives them famous people to design—Don Quixote, or Mario.) They were based on the Japanese art of kokeshi, armless wooden dolls.
The Miis weren’t just for Mario Paint – ish fun. Each family member would design his or her own Mii, which would be his or her avatar. The Miis showed up as spectators in other games, such as Mario Kart Wii. Character customization was once a true burden to use. The Mii Creator’s depths and ease made it a game to design a custom face. After all, game designers