The Conduit delayed: bad news for The Wii?

Poor old Wii. I still maintain that playing a good game on the Wii is just about the most enjoyable gaming experience you can have, but it’s not an easy thing to do. Given the scarcity of good titles and glut of shovelware, the average Wii sits unattended for lengthy spells waiting for the next arrival of a rarer-than-Hero-dolls Triple A title.

Which is why it probably didn’t need the announcement that the long awaited Wii FPS The Conduit has been delayed due to ‘localisation issues’. It’s only a short delay, moving the game from June 26th back to July 10th, and it goes a little way towards excusing the usually ominous rarity of review samples, but still, it’s a blow to the Wii.

Following an E3 at which Micrsoft and Sony both announced exciting new technology and games, the Wii at present can muster in it’s defence the prospect of four new Mario games, a faint rumour of a new Zelda title and a £15 add-on gadget that simply makes the Wiimote as responsive as most people hoped it would be back when they shelled out £170 for the console in the first place.

Really, with the future looking so unoriginal, the Wii needed The Conduit ASAP to keep people interested.

Ok, so if there are no further delays, it’s a matter of three weeks. But it’s three weeks that will see the release of Fight Night Round 4, Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood, Ghostbusters and Overlord II on other platforms. Ok, its not like the other consoles are getting new Halo or Metal Gear Solid games, but it’s still a list of highly anticipated titles, and to compete the Wii needed to offer more than just re-issues of old Donkey Kong and Resident Evil games (really, I love Resident Evil games, but I’ve got them all on Wii compatible Gamecube discs, am I really going to pay for them again just for added Wii-waggling?).

To be fair, its only a three week delay, but it’s three weeks at the end of dry spell that goes back several months. I’m sure The Conduit will be great when it finally gets here, but it’s a pattern that repeats itself far too often, and when a Wii lies unused during the huge gulfs between good games, it’s hard not to wonder if gamers eyes will start to wander.

What's the plan?

Ok, so the great thing about this being my blog is that I can say what I want. If my first thought about UFC Undisputed is that it contains a disturbing amount of sweaty redneck manwrestling, then I don’t have to convert that into a comment on the ‘complexities of the ground game’.

I can also offer partial opinions and reviews in progress. Frankly, there are entire forums full of professional game reviewers making trumped-up claims to how much of a game they play before writing the review - the baseline is always ‘the whole story mode’, after which the assembled hacks attempt to trump each other by adding ‘several hours of multiplayer’, ‘several hours on all the maps’ or ‘playing the story mode on a higher difficulty, completing all the mini-games and collecting all the special items’. Frankly, I’m waiting for one of those berks to claim that a review isn’t done until they’ve got a full DNA sequence of the lead programmer.

Aside from the fact that I think they’re all lying, there’s a hell of a difference between what I have to do for work and what I have to do for fun, and this blog is for my own amusement. There’s not a chance in hell that I’m going to write a review based on all three discs and 40 hours of play in Star Ocean: The Last Hope when I’ve got Prototype and Fight Night Round 4 sitting next to the Xbox and Conduit on its way for the Wii.

On top of that, it’s my blog, not a news blog, so I don’t have to be timely. When Resident Evil 5 came out, I went on a retro binge and played through Resi 1, 2, 3, 4 and 0 for nostalgia value. I intended to then jump into Resi 5 at the end of it, but strangely enough I was all zombied out, so it just sits in my pile. In any case, I can write about my enjoyment of those decade old games rather than having to worry about whether Killzone 2 being the best looking game I’ve ever seen makes up for the fact that I was a little bit bored by it.

So… you can expect unvarnished opinions that may wander off topic, but will hopefully be useful simply by dint of their honesty. You can expect reviews that might not take into account the annoying fetch quest which happens eight hours in because, hey, I got bored and something better came along, alright? And you can expect opinions, digressions and meanderings based on whatever games I happen to have loved or hated in the past that just happen to have bubbled back up to the forefront of my thoughts right now.

Essentially, this will be a blog on which a professional game reviewer behaves like an ordinary fan, and has a great deal more fun because of it.