I really hope that's not true of the Slim, or I'm screwed. >.> (hey, my standalone player sucks)
Heh, I'm taking chances myself, since I've modded my slimjim in order to play imports (tape n tissue FTW!
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Again, so far so good. In fact, it's looking like I may have to eventually get another SwapDisk, while my PS2 still lives.
There's one other thing that severely damaged my confidence in Nintendo's development: Mario Kart Wii.
That game's AI is a complete nightmare (this coming from someone who enjoyed Double Dash), the unlock conditions are extremely unrealistic, and the cut-down multiplayer options add insult to injury. The game is, to its credit, by far the best Wi-Fi setup that Nintendo has ever established. But offline, it's pretty lousy. The fact that Nintendo tried to pass that as a killer app bothers me. Add in Wii Music and Animal Crossing at the end of '08, and Nintendo did a lot of damage to their reputation. I'm hoping this was an isolated incident, but we'll see.
One way of examining this, is to look at it the same way as what happened over the DS's lifetime, especially those early years.
Hindsight being 20/20, it's easy to see that there's a lot that the Early DS sear have a lot with the first 2 years of the Wii. "Killer apps" were rather spaced out, "Casual" games were dominating the shelves, and the 3rd parties had yet to really come out & show what they were made of.
My thinking is, Iwata is a smart business man, and he's basically doing the same thing all over again, with the Wii. The first two years were meant to do more to get the Casual Gamer money, because that's what really gives them a license to print money (as was the case with the DS). Now that he's got Casual Gamers eating out of the palm of Nintendo's hands (once again), now it may come to thing of where, Nintendo is willing to do more to deliver on their end, while more 3rd parties will be eager to try and do their damnedest to get in on that.
Far as I'm concerned, that's exactly what's going on. We could stand to have a number of more additional "megatons" unveiled over the next few months and up to E3, while we already know that such things like Dragon Quest X and Monster Hunter Tri are in the pipeline. And reportedly, Iwata is just as interested in marketing these Japanese favorites in the West as each individual developer is. And if those "cash cow" franchises really deliver on the Wii, that will only give the likes of Square Enix and Capcom more reason to support the console (with hopefully more goods than just sequels to those cash cows and others, like Sengoku BASARA and Rockman for Capcom and more FF/DQ spin-offs from SE). Then there's Sega, who's pretty much already amped up their Wii-related gameplans, by starting with the likes of MadWorld, and we could stand to see more where that came from.
So yeah...in short, there's a good deal of evidence that this could stand to be the year that Wii owners will come to really love their console (again), non-believers may become believers and all that good stuff.
Again, though....I don't see the Wii moving more consoles just yet. Not until we start seeing more "deluxe consoles" unveiled, or maybe a good price drop. A special edition Wii, for the sake of something like DQX and/or MH Tri would definitely move more units, at least in Japan, certainly...