Enthusiast site Ars Technica declares that “Wii Play becomes first bad game to sell 10 million“.
While Wii Play isn’t my favorite game, perhaps the Ars Technica headline and the 61% GameRanking average are both misleading? I do think it contains a good deal of enjoyable minigames suitable for a lazy afternoon.
In a Gamasutra article on Silver Gamers, Wii Play Cow Racing is even singled out as a popular minigame.
Is Wii Play a bad game? Or is it just a game for an audience other than game journalists?
(Image from Tiger Direct.)
You can actually look up the average number of play hours for Wii games on the Wii Nintendo Channel, about as descriptivist a metric of quality as one could hope for. Wii Play stands at about 10 hours per copy–it’s no Mario Kart (29 hrs) or Wii Sports (34 hrs) or Guitar Hero III (58 hrs!!!), but it’s got Wii Music (8 hrs), De Blob (8 hrs), and Geometry Wars (6 hrs) handily beat. So people are definitely getting their 10 bucks worth out of it, one way or another.
Yeah – some of the games could be improved (more play modes in the tank game, for example), but it’s a decent game.
I also think Wii Play is an “OK” game. Fun for an afternoon with friends or family, and very nice to introduce the Wii Console to new players.
But, considering the game was bundled with a second controller, I don’t think you can “compare” its sales scores with others “unbundled” games. But I wonder if the game could perform so well if it was sold on its own :).
(Or maybe if it was sold for 10$ on its own, it would have performed better, as the cheaper game released for the console?)
Regarding game reviews, we all know that they only reflect subjective appreciation of the reviewers, and thence cannot be used as a reliable ressource for the evaluation of game quality ;)
Wii Play is popular for the same reason that movies such as Beverly Hills Chihuahua rake in the ticket sales: it’s quick, easy, approachable, and doesn’t ask too much of the consumer. Something good for family night because everybody can play with minimal instruction.
DDams: But then perhaps there is a problem with game reviewers being unable to evaluate games for a larger audience?
Brandon: I agree – I think the problem with video games really hasn’t been any lack of the “Citizen Kane” of games (there are dozens), but the lack of a “Beverly Hills Chihuahua” of games.
Jesper: I see your point, but I’m not sure I agree with you. There was a time when video games had a distinct learning curve, and the only people who could truly enjoy them were people who were already gamers. In the past couple of years, however, thanks to the Wii and broadband Internet, there has been a flood of casual games with slight learning curves and forgiving difficulties: while “Citizen Kane” games are not yet a thing of the past, I fear that one day (not soon) we’ll find the pendulum to have swung in the opposite direction, and video games will become the kind of quick-and-dirty entertainment they were thought to be by non-gamers. Hopefully the indie scene will help stop that from happening, as well as online gaming.
Brandon – we agree that casual games have changed the whole equation.
Hopefully games don’t follow a pendulum, but can simply diverge in different directions.
I don’t think that metacritic – or even the number of hours spent playing any particular game – really apply to Wii Play. The game is not meant for “gamers”, and that means it wasn’t made for game journalists, and it isn’t going to be played for 10 hours a week.
There’s nothing wrong with just wanting to play a quick game every now and again, it doesn’t make the experience any less wholesome or meaningful. The attitude that it does is one of those things that keeps gaming from being taken seriously in any way.