Teen Gets Unwanted Surprise in Nintendo Box

Jodi Wykle knew her son would be thrilled when she gave him a new Nintendo DS for his birthday.

Instead, he was rocked.

According to WTSP-TV, the confused teen opened up his gift only to find bunch of stones and a rolled up Chinese newspaper in place of the popular handheld.

Needless to say, mom was equally stunned.

“When he opened it, he was pulling the seal off, my sister-in-law carries a pocket knife and she opened it and that’s when he pulled it out and it was Chinese newspaper and a bunch of rocks,” she explained.

The troubling discovery prompted the Florida woman to contact the local Wal-Mart where she bought the curious box and complain, but reportedly workers there told her it wasn’t their problem and that she should contact Nintendo instead. Of course, Nintendo told her roughly the same thing, leaving mother and son with a $138 box of rocks.

“They don’t want to do nothing. They want me to keep the box of rocks. I’m not buying a box of rocks for $138,” she said.

Amazingly enough, however, Wal-Mart soon caved after learning that the same box of rocks had been previously returned by another disgruntled customer. How exactly it made it back onto store shelves remains a mystery, but for her troubles, Wykle was given a full refund and a $20 gift card.

It’s not the first time Wal-Mart has gotten into hot water for selling a questionable handheld. Earlier this month, a PSP system bought at a different Wal-Mart store in Florida was found to contain a memory stick filled with pornographic images.

by Ben Silverman

Recent News Spells Trouble for the Wii

In the three years since it first launched, the Nintendo Wii has sailed past competing systems from Sony and Microsoft to consistently claim the top spot in the console war.

But if a recent rash of troubling stories about the Wii is a vision of things to come, the tide might be turning for the seemingly unbeatable machine.

Kinks in the system’s shiny white armor starting showing last month. Despite steady success in Japan, the Wii fell into second place in March as the underdog Playstation 3 clambered atop the region’s sales charts for the first time in 16 months. That was enough to garner some uncharacteristically somber comments from Nintendo President Satoru Iwata, who deemed the climate in Japan “unhealthy” for the Wii.

But to Cowan & Company analyst Doug Creutz, the U.S. market isn’t necessarily any healthier, at least if you’re thinking of investing in a console game. In an interview with Gamasutra, Creutz called the Wii “fool’s gold” for third-party game developers.

“The choice here is really between investing for the Xbox 360 and PS3 — since their capabilities are fairly similar — or the Wii,” he said. “I would caution investors and developers that the larger installed base of the Wii is really a bit of a red herring.”

Crueutz goes on to point out that while the 19 million Wiis in North America trounce competing consoles individually, combined sales of the 360 and PS3 actually top 22 million. That represents a larger chunk of the pie for game developers who can more easily port games back and forth from the two systems. Additionally, Creutz notes that Nintendo’s first-party games and the Guitar Hero and Rock Band franchises account for nearly one-half of all Wii software sales, a far larger percentage than what’s found on the other consoles. Comparatively, the Wii is simply a tougher nut to crack for third-party developers.

Peter Moore, president of enormous third-party game maker EA Sports, echoed Creutz’s concerns while speaking at a recent conference.

“You simply can’t take what you’re doing on the PS3 and Xbox and port - that’s a dirty word - down to the Wii,” he said, insisting that instead you have to build Wii games “from the ground up.”

He’s not the only one at EA with issues. Earlier in the month, an EA producer confessed to having trouble incorporating Nintendo’s upcoming Wii MotionPlus control attachment into its Grand Slam Tennis game, raising questions about when the tech would be ready for consumers. Nintendo answered that by officially announcing a release date only to curiously push back the release of the game they’ve repeatedly used to show off the new technology, surefire smash sequel Wii Sports: Resort.

Of course, it’s not all doom and gloom. NPD Group reports that the Wii again led the way in March 2009, outselling both the 360 and PS3 by a wide margin. Nintendo is also enjoying strong numbers for its newly released DSi handheld, with the company reporting first-week sales of over 600,000 units in the U.S. and Europe. Mario’s checking account won’t run out of funds any time soon.

The question is, will gamers run out of interest? The last two major first-party Wii games, Wii Music and Animal Crossing: City Folk, failed to generate the kind of excitement (and, in turn, sales) that Nintendo is accustomed to, a fact that analyst Ed Barton of Screen Digest believes is a big reason why the Wii is struggling. While older blockbusters like Wii Fit and Mario Kart Wii are still selling well, Barton points out that the company needs new experiences to drive new sales.

Nintendo hopes to deliver exactly that with upcoming high-profile games like the aforementioned Wii Sports sequel and a remake of classic boxing game Punch Out!, but that still leaves plenty of wiggle room for the Playstation 3 and the Xbox 360 to continue closing the gap. And if Japan is any indication (and it usually is), that gap can disappear in a heartbeat.

So what do you think? Is the Wii destined for a downfall, or is this just a mid-life crisis?

by Ben Silverman

9 Year Old Whiz Creates Popular iPhone App

You might think you’re pretty hot stuff because you’ve figured out how to change your Facebook status from your iPhone, but you’ve got nothing on nine-year-old Lim Ding Wen.

This young prodigy from Singapore is fluent in six programming languages, according to a BBC report this week, and his newest creation, an iPhone drawing game called Doodle Kids, has racked up over 4,000 downloads in just two weeks. He wrote it for his younger sisters, who love to draw.

Doodle Kids, which lets players sketch with their fingers on the iPhone’s screen and shake it, Etch-A-Sketch-style, to clear, has already racked up a healthy three-and-a-half star rating on the App Store. One reviewer commented: “Awesome app!…Amazing that something like this was made by a 9 year old”.

Want to try it out for yourself? If you have iTunes installed, you can find it right here, for free.

By Mike Smith

Critics Say the Wii has a Major Flaw

There are too many crappy games on the Wii.

So says the global boss of 2K Games, Christoph Hartmann, and at least in the opinion of video game critics, he’s on to something. Using figures from review aggregation site Metacritic.com, almost half of Wii games released since the console launched in 2006 have scored below 65%, compared with about a third of Xbox 360 and PS3 titles. And 65% is a pretty crappy aggregate score, considering that many game review sites rarely score below 50%.

Raise the bar to 85%, and the difference is even more pronounced: 360 owners can play twice as many games rated above 85% as Wii owners, while the PS3 nearly triples Nintendo’s numbers.

Broadly, this problem isn’t Nintendo’s fault. In fact, without sterling first-party games like Super Mario Galaxy, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, and Super Smash Bros. Brawl, the Wii’s situation would be far worse. Nintendo-developed games, with the possible exception of Wii Music, are a beacon of quality in a sea of, as Hartmann so indelicately puts it, crap.

Fortunately, this situation isn’t lost on most consumers. According to game sales authority NPD Group, the top ten best-selling Wii games — titles like Mario Kart, Wii Fit, and last year’s number one game, Wii Play — accounted for about 44% of all Wii game purchases in 2008. The remaining 56% spanned over 400 other titles.

That’s not the worst of it. Sales of Wii games that reviewed poorly (including 2K Games’ own Carnival Games, which aggregated a dismal 56%) eclipse those of many of the Wii’s real gems, including the breathtaking Okami, the superb Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, and even the lighthearted, family-friendly Steven Spielberg project Boom Blox, which should have been a perfect fit for the Wii’s unprecedentedly broad audience. The Wii has a curious ability to make big hits out of low-scoring games.

Perhaps it’s the critics’ fault. Do video game reviewers, who typically boast decades of gaming experience and a deep affinity for the integrity of video games as a serious pursuit, miss the point of casual-friendly Wii sales hits like Carnival Games? Perhaps, but the connection isn’t as tempting as it might appear. Because Roger Ebert lists La Dolce Vita and Aguirre: Wrath of God among his top-ten films, should we assume, when he slams Bride Wars, he’s doing it because he’s elitist and doesn’t understand movie consumers? Or maybe he just knows what makes a crap movie.

By and large, consumers do, too. Who, once burnt by a tempting but terrible Wii game like Ford Racing Off-Road or Jenga: World Tour, would not be hesitant to take a chance on a genuinely outstanding title like Zack & Wiki or Boom Blox? If they buy games at all, consumers will limit their picks to reliable names, while the delightful upstart games to which the Wii is so suited will sink beneath the tide of crap. At worst, they’ll be so disgruntled that they’ll shelve the Wii altogether, relegated to a dust-gathering embarrassment that’s pulled out for a token Wii Sports or Wii Fit session once every few months.

So what can you do about it? Get educated. Without good resources, your odds of dodging bad games are not favorable. Sites like metacritic.com and gamerankings.com both provide great jumping-off points for research. Best of all, take a web-enabled phone with you to the store and you can look them up right before you buy. Although it’s true that some reviewers miss the point of broad-appeal titles like Tetris Party or Monopoly, the majority will at least help you dodge the crap.

By Mike Smith

Wii Fit is unfit: A parental controversy

When a 10 year-old girl from the South-East of Britain stepped on the scale of Nintendo’s new game Wii Fit, she expected to get the blood pumping with some fun, casual exercising.

Instead, the game’s software told her she was fat. Understandably, her father wasn’t happy.

“She is a perfectly healthy, 4ft 9in tall 10-year-old who swims, dances and weighs only six stone (84 lbs). She is solidly built but not fat. She was devastated to be called fat and we had to work hard to convince her she isn’t.”

Obesity experts in the U.K. are working equally hard taking Nintendo to task for failing to warn parents that Wii Fit isn’t appropriate for younger kids. At the center of the debate is the game’s use of the Body Mass Index (BMI) as a means of judging the health of its players. After standing on the game’s innovative Balance Board peripheral and entering basic information like height and weight, the game doles out an overall BMI number as well as a label, such as “underweight,” “ideal,” or in some cases, “fat.” While the somewhat callous system is reasonably accurate in determining the BMI of adults, a child’s BMI can literally change from day to day. Experts have deemed its use in Wii Fit misleading.

“I’m absolutely aghast that children are being told they are fat,” said Tam Fry of the National Obesity Forum. “BMI is far from perfect but with children it simply should not be used. A child’s BMI can change every month and it is perfectly possible for a child to be stocky, yet still very fit.”

Nintendo apologized for the terminology used to describe players, but stopped short of actually adding a warning to the game.

“Wii Fit is still capable of measuring the BMI for people aged between two and 20 but the resulting figures may not be entirely accurate for younger age groups due to varying levels of development,” the company said through a spokesman.

Nintendo’s exergame is already a bona fide international hit, selling out quickly in both Japan and Europe. The game releases in North America on May 19.

By Ben Silverman