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11.22.2010

Nintendo offering Wiiware game demos yet again

I swear I know nothing about game demos!
Starting today Nintendo is offering game demos on the Wii Shop Channel for all to enjoy. Now you may remember that last year Nintendo tried this idea before and gave us one round of demos. Then silence and it seemed that the lumbering online doofus giant went into hibernation mode. Now, If you open up the Wii Shop Channel you can try out 4 different games courtesy of someone at Nintendo getting off their duff and actually using the channel to sell us games for once.

The four demos made available are Bit.Trip.Fate, And Yet It Moves, Jett Rocket, and Thru-Space. Not at all a bad offering and if you care what I think, then I would recommend giving Bit.Trip.Fate and And Yet It Moves some of your time. I tried them both out this morning and had a good time, Oh yeah!

The current stated plan is that every Monday we'll be seeing new demos offered up for download. So after 4 years Nintendo is really starting to get more serious about its online store and push sales for games that have gotten lost in the Wii Shop Channels crappy design. Who knows why the abrupt change of course, but one can speculate that over the last year the Wiiware and Virtual console have been lacking in the awesome games department. It may be a last ditch effort to drum up some extra sales and hopefully keep developers interested in the service or a dry run to figure out how to fix their online setup for the new 3DS shop channel. Whatever the reason, its about damn time Nintendo.

4 comments:

  1. "The current stated plan is that every Monday we'll be seeing new demos offered up for download. So after 4 years Nintendo is really starting to get more serious about its online store and push sales for games that have gotten lost in the Wiishop Channels crappy design."

    I don't know why they started the demos, then just stopped it...makes no sense to me, but then again I don't work at Nintendo and have their mindset.

    Perhaps it was accidentally stopped, when one of the piles of cash accidentally shifted over on the "Stop Demo" button.

    I'm just glad it's back, and I'll get trying out Jett Rocket probably tonight...

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  2. @Coffee Yeah it sure is a mystery. They may have not seen enough sales to justify the effort the first go around, but I think they realized that their online shop is not consumer friendly. I bet half the people didn't even know about the demos the first time around. They rarely send out messages to Wii owners through their Wii mail service (whatever its called) for promotion.

    I gave Jett Rocket a go. Not bad for a basic platformer... reminded me of Super Mario. It's surprising how much you can do with the 50mb limit. It makes me wonder about Super Meat Boy and if they'll be able to compress it down. I'm not a game designer so I can't say to much.

    By far "And Yet It Moves" was my favorite demo.

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  3. :/ Feels too little, too late. The whole Wii Gui is just bad. I just don't like it at all, even when they send me some kind of message and my Wii is glowing, I usually ignore it... in fact it's glowing right now, but I'll probably continue to ignore it.

    I am really glad they are doing this finally, so I can actually check one some of those games that I was interested in buying. Still though, Wii seems dead.

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  4. Sounds like a podcast discussion, is the Wii dead like the black knight from Monty Python... hoping around with no arms and one leg... one leg to go? Stayed tuned on the next episode of Who Burned My Toast!

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