Above: LostWinds, by Frontier, is a WiiWare launch title -- maybe.
With the Japanese launch of WiiWare already a distant memory, most industry watchers expected Nintendo's recent media summit to answer our questions about the impending U.S. launch of the games-on-demand service on May 12.
But while the games they showed at the event were almost uniformly excellent, that doesn't count as "details." We still don't know several very important things, like: When are these games coming out? How much space will they take up on our Wiis? How much will they cost? And, really, what are the games we'll see on day one?
Below, the unanswered questions of WiiWare and why our efforts to figure them out were stymied.
When are these games coming out?
While these are the first games being shown off as WiiWare releases, they aren't necessarily the launch titles for the service. In fact, when I asked around, not one of the developers I spoke to would commit to having their game at launch. Frontier's David Braben merely said that they were crossing their fingers that LostWinds would make launch. That's the feeling I got from the makers of Major League Eating, too -- that their game was certainly scheduled for launch, but that nothing was in stone.
I assume that Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, long promised for launch, will make it. But we know that Telltale Games' *Strong Bad *episodes won't begin until June -- they're calling it "launch window," but day one it is not. World of Goo isn't even close.
How much space will they take up on our Wiis?
WiiWare impressed me at the summit mostly because it was pretty clear that these games kicked the ass of Japan's launch titles up and down the street. While Japan had a few okay games and a bunch of clunkers, the games on display here were polished and exciting, filled with personality, and really made us want to take them home already.
But a lot of that reason seems to be the differing attitudes toward WiiWare's approximate 40 MB space limitation. Japan's developers have by and large made their WiiWare games as small as possible -- some of them only take up as much space as a largish Virtual Console game. But in the U.S., the maximum size limit seems to be what everyone is aiming for -- at least, just judging by the quality of the games.
Of Japan's launch games, Crystal Chronicles and Okiraku Ping-Pong max out the file size at about 300 blocks each. Wii's memory capacity is about 1800 blocks. Can you imagine a lineup of seven launch games, but all of them as large as those two? You wouldn't be able to fit them all on your Wii.
Nintendo wasn't letting developers talk about it, either. I asked Telltale -- who, let's remember, is selling us a suite of five episodes -- how big each episode would be, and whether you'd be able to fit a "season" onto your Wii. They said they were told not to discuss anything like that.
Well, we need to know, for purely practical purposes -- we need to clean out the ol' fridge before WiiWare hits, you know.
How much will they cost?
That's something else they weren't allowed to discuss. Price is a real sticking point for WiiWare titles. Games that are ludicrously overpriced at 1000 points could be worth it at 500. I might feel entirely comfortable telling you to buy, say, the bubble-popping game Pop, but only if it's 500 points -- anything higher and I might decide that it's a ripoff for what you get.
Not to mention the fact that, well, we should know what Square Enix is planning to do with Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles' downloadable content. It'll likely be similar to the Japanese version's, but let's have some details.
And really, what are the games we'll see on day one?
Surely the absence of games like Dr. Mario and Saku Saku Animal Panic at Nintendo's summit doesn't mean they're not going to put them on WiiWare. It simply means that Nintendo wanted to choose only the highest-quality, biggest-budget titles to show off at the summit. But at some point, they've got to actually talk about all the games they want to put on WiiWare.
So for all the hype, the media summit didn't bring all the answers we really wanted about what the U.S. side of the WiiWare service is going to look like. The good news is, with the May 12 launch date coming up very soon, Nintendo will have to announce all of this stuff sooner rather than later. Here's hoping the delay isn't because they've got something to hide.
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