Skyward Fire

Until a year ago, I never understood the success of Nintendo Wii. I always thought it was the best selling console with the worst line up of the videogames history, and so did many others across the world. I refused to agree with NPD numbers, and so did many PS360 owners everywhere. But then again, I’m not a kid, I’m no mother with a child, I’m no grandparent with grandkids, I’m no aunt or uncle with nieces or nephews, and neither am I a casual gamer. And quite a marginal number of gamers who might be reading this article won’t consider themselves casual gamers either, so it’s safe for me to make that statement.

For the gift giving crowd, the Wii is by far the best console amongst the basic three to choose from. Especially with it’s line-up of fitness games, it’s also by far the best console for the holiday season with many women looking to work off all that food they eat during the holiday season. January’s NPD very much reflects what the sales figures were like for the Nintendo Wii and the games lined up for the same over the stretch of the holiday season in 2009. We’re talking about games that are family and party friendly, unlike what we usually have for the PC, the PS3, and the Xbox 360.

The lack of games that more gamer oriented (‘hardcore’, as some might put it as) people would find attractive is also a reason for the kind of stereotype that the Wii has become. Wii is no longer a fad, and is going to continue to sell more units inline with X360 and PS3 going forward. One month out of the year doesn’t diminish in anyway the trend that was established over the course of the whole year.

That said, this isn’t to say it won’t continue to outsell the HD consoles month to month, but it probably won’t dominate sales month to month as it did in past years. And it will also continue to dominate December sales figures until we move onto the next generation of videogame consoles.

Who else believes that the days are numbered for some of the current "hot" game series? We lost some from last decade when the 2000s came in. New gaming trends came along, new technologies came that led to social gaming going crazy (unfortunately). Some things just became stale, and new graphics and sequels failed to bring the sales.

So, just what’s on the way out and what’s on the way in? Try your luck at being the next great videogame prophet!

Thought I’d do a quick, short post regarding some hidden trickery concerning the demo for Rocksteady Studios’ Batman: Arkham Asylum.

ATI users, you can enable the additional PhysX effects manually by editing the file “Documents\Eidos\Batman Arkham Asylum Demo\BmGame\Config\UserEngine.ini”, and setting PhysXLevel=1 or 2. They’ll run on the CPU.

The demo is driving quite nicely on my configuration and looks really slick. If you haven’t tried it out yet, get the demo at http://bit.ly/87Da1